Moving to Dubai – An Austrian’s Perspective

This is a guest post by the Editorial Team of InterNations, the leading social network for expats worldwide with more than 420,000 members and Local Communities in 295 cities. Check out their website to meet fellow expatriates in the UAE and feel at home away from home!

Moving to Dubai takes some getting used to. Okay, this applies to every place worldwide, but expatriation to Dubai, from Austria, to work on a huge IT consulting project in “Internet City” required more adjustment than expected. International consultants are no strangers to travel, but it’s different if you commit to expat living for a couple of years.

It started with negotiating the “perks” of the contract. Austria is big on a “welfare state” when it comes to healthcare and pension funds. My employer was willing to take out health insurance for my family to add to Dubai’s basic coverage. Talking about pension plans, however, turned into tough negotiations. There’s no social security agreement between Austria and the UAE: lots of Dubai expatriates prefer paying into a private fund to make up for the contributions they lose at home. Getting your boss to agree you shouldn’t pay out of your own pocket can be tricky!

And let’s not mention the small matter of school fees… Dubai has excellent international schools, but excellence comes at a cost. We gathered the German school has bargain prices for fifth graders, though. With about 7,500 € in tuition fees, German-language parents are better off, financially, than some US couples we met, who paid twice as much.

The first advice for expats about to go to Dubai is: If you have the leverage, drive a hard bargain with HR – even as a well-to-do expatriate. You may have to uproot your family, and your cost of living will change. The other tip is to involve your family as much as you can.

My employer was great when it came to helping me prepare for Dubai: cross-cultural training, mentoring from former expats etc. But nobody thought of my spouse and kid! Our eleven-year-old son recovered from culture shock pretty quickly. My wife? Not so much. She took a two-year sabbatical from her job, unable to obtain a Dubai work visa as a lawyer focusing on Austrian family law, and she was rather worried about getting back on track after our return. That put a huge strain on our marriage, which we didn’t notice at first. She thought now that I was the only “breadwinner”, I no longer took her seriously. Do listen to your partner’s concerns when going abroad, and you don’t have to learn this the hard way like us.