Today's Edition
ISIDORA CIRIC (ABU DHABI)
The UAE continues its reign as the Gulf’s talent champion and has taken over the title of the world’s best place for access to growth opportunities in the latest Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI), published on Wednesday.
The report ranked the country 25th overall among 135 economies, with a score of 59.36, above industrial giants such as Spain, Japan, Italy and Russia, and well ahead of Gulf neighbours led by Qatar (35th), Bahrain (38th), Saudi Arabia (48th), Kuwait (51st), and Oman (56th).
Across the wider West Asia and North Africa region, only one economy ranks higher, leaving the Emirates as the region’s primary mover on talent policy.
Launched by INSEAD in 2013, the index tracks how nations develop, attract and retain human capital across six pillars – Attract, Grow, Retain, Vocational and Technical (VT) Skills, and Generalist Adaptive (GA) Skills – and 77 indicators.
The 2025 edition, themed “Resilience in the Age of Disruption”, focuses on how talent systems are responding to emerging shocks, including the frenzied AI revolution, geopolitical uncertainties, global health crises, and fluctuating mobility patterns.
The UAE’s headline strength lies in the Attract pillar, which captures a country’s pull on foreign investments and highly-skilled migrants, as well as its success in removing barriers for women, underprivileged citizens and other under-represented groups. Here, the UAE ranks third worldwide, supported by a second-place finish in the External Openness sub-pillar.
“The United Arab Emirates maintains its regional leadership and continues to set the benchmark” in attracting talent, the GTCI report said.
The report added that the country’s “exceptional” external openness score “is driven by the world’s highest migrant stock and international student inflows (both 1st)”, along with a first-place ranking for tolerance of immigrants, second in brain gain and third in AI skills migration.
Enable, the pillar that gauges regulatory, market and labour settings, places the UAE in 30th place overall, “well above the regional average”. The report pointed to “world-class digital connectivity”, citing universal 3G coverage and internet access in schools, both ranked first globally, government effectiveness in ninth, and cluster development tenth - evidence of what the authors describe as a “dynamic market landscape”.
In VT Skills - mid-level abilities tested by employability - the UAE takes sixth for employability, seventh for education relevance, and 36th overall. Within the newly renamed GA Skills pillar, which looks beyond classroom education to the pathways that build skills over time, the country claimed the top global place in access to growth opportunities and 29th overall, trussed by the world’s most active virtual social networks and second-ranked professional networks.
Compared with its high-income peer group, the UAE outpaced the average in two out of the six pillars and outperformed them in six out of the fourteen sub-pillars. Closer to home, the country outmatched its regional peers in each of the six pillars and beat the Northern Africa and Western Asia average in 13 of 14 sub-pillars, ranging from education and lifelong learning to sustainability, lifestyle, employability and talent impact.
According to the report, this combination signals an “increasingly diversified and innovation-driven workforce” that is both technologically fluent and adaptable to shifting labour-market demands.
