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I am interested in moving to The UAE,preferably to Dubai in early 2008.
My background and qualifications are in the motor industry and I have over 15 years managerial and sales expeience + recognised motor industry qualifications.I have sales experince with mainly prestige and volume brands.

I am still young (37) and single and am very eager to spend up to 10 years in this part of the world.

My main questions are -
What is the best way to seek employment in this business,I know of some agencies that specialise in this area.
What is the pay like + conditions like ?
To the best of my knowledge there is good tax free money to be made.
What are the chances of promotion like,I am english speaking and from Ireland.

I would be grateful for your thoughts or comments on this.

Gerry

Hi there Gerry,
the motor vehicle industry in the UAE is basically sales and maintenance, to the best of my knowledge there is no production in the region; however i think that some of the "off the shelf" European models have to be adapted to conditions in the middle east prior to being sold (the so called "gulf spec") - whether this takes place at source, or when the vehicle enters the countries I cannot say.

The vehicle industry in the UAE, like so much "big business" is basically carved up amongst a number of large local family groups; that is to say that they tend to be family owned agencies. in some instances a single family will have the distribution rights to a few different makes of vehicles, but normally never offer models that are in direct comparison to each other (if you follow my reasoning).

Positions within the industry depend on who you are working for and some of the agencies have distribution rights for some products over the whole GCC area, not just the UAE.

The easiest way to find out who the agent is is to type the make of vehicle into Google, along with the words "agent" and "UAE"; for example "Toyota agent UAE" gives you the agency owner as "Al Futtaim". Go to the specific agents website (all of the big players have them), and see what information you can glean about the company - some of them have careers links. This is a good starting point.

I met a few guys in the industry when I first moved to Dubai; they have since then moved on - so I am unable to give you any further direct leads. From the sounds of it though, the larger the company the more bureaucracy and office politics there was to face. In addition some of the larger, older family run businesses normally have a number of the owners' siblings working within the company, sometimes a blessing, sometimes a hindrance.