Re-Entering the Workforce in Abu Dhabi: What Women Bring After Time Away
For many women living in Abu Dhabi and across the UAE, time away from the workforce is both planned and intentional. Sometimes it’s necessary when raising a family far from an established support network, and often it’s part of the reality of re-entering the workforce in Abu Dhabi later on. In other cases, women step back to support a partner’s career, manage relocations, and help their families settle into unfamiliar surroundings. For some, this time in their lives is temporary; for others, it spans the years spent shepherding children through key stages of development.
So let’s visit a few things worth keeping in mind…
Your experience still counts
Let’s begin with your experience. Just because you have been away from work for an extended period of time doesn’t mean that all the experience you acquired when you were has disappeared into thin air. Parental leave teaches us a great deal, and we bring those lessons into our everyday lives, whether or not that work is formally recognised as employment.
Even if you don’t have traditional office experience, I’m here to tell you that if you’ve spent years managing a household, coordinating schedules, navigating healthcare systems, supporting children or extended family, and/or overseeing countless other responsibilities, you’ve been practising leadership and decision-making on the daily… you’re sitting on a goldmine of experience!
From myself, and an HR perspective, this is lived experience. Lived experience is solid gold because it means that you have physically and emotionally lived through issues, assessed and managed risks, probably failed once or twice, got back up and dusted yourself off, then succeeded… and lived to tell the tale with all the lessons learned tucked neatly in your back pocket for future use.
Lived experience matters. Trust me, others will be dearly grateful for your wisdom.
You are more adaptable than ever
Women who step away from traditional work to support their families are often highly adaptable. When living as expats, women learn to navigate new countries and cultures, unfamiliar systems, and ways of life that require constant adjustment, especially if their families have relocated often. Alongside that, family needs shift, days rarely unfold as planned, and priorities are continually reassessed in real time. In today’s workplaces, particularly in international, fast-moving environments, adaptability is not a “soft skill”, but a core competency. The ability to respond to change calmly, learn quickly, and adjust without losing momentum is what organisations value most, and it’s something women possess in abundance.
Adaptability also shows up in how women help others. Years of responding to changing needs teach you to anticipate what’s required, adjust your approach, and stay composed when plans shift. In client service, this shows up as responsiveness, emotional intelligence, and an ability to meet clients where they are. (Psst: Simon Sinek has plenty to say about why human and emotional intelligence matters.)
My final point on adaptability is that it underpins modern ways of working. Project-based work, remote collaboration, asynchronous communication, and client-led timelines all require being comfortable with change (often unpredictable change). Women who’ve lived in near-constant adjustment often excel here, because flexibility is already built into how they operate. They’re able to recalibrate rather than freeze up when things get dicey. In today’s professional landscape, that ability to adapt while remaining reliable is one of the most valuable traits anyone can bring.
You are operationally stronger than you were before you left your last job
Operational strength comes from planning with limited resources, prioritising competing demands, solving problems in real time, and making sound decisions without full information. These are practical competencies that are developed through lived responsibility, even home and family-related responsibilities. You exercise operational thinking every day, whether you’re managing a household, coordinating family logistics, or handling day-to-day demands. In professional settings, organisations rely on these same capabilities in operations, project management, and leadership roles.
Even when this experience doesn’t translate neatly to every work setting, it still provides a strong foundation. With critical thinking, the rest is learnable… which brings me to the next point…
Learning curves are not a weakness, they are a challenge
Learning curves often sneakily masquerade as challenges that many women already have the skills to meet. It’s natural to worry that systems, tools, or workplace expectations have changed during time away. Learning curves, however, require exposure rather than entirely new skillsets.
Lived experience shortens learning curves by giving you something solid to build on. If you’ve adapted to new environments, technologies, routines, or roles before, you already know how to learn again. Time away from traditional work often deepens this process through perspective, judgement, and confidence.
Pro-tip: don’t spend too much time chasing things you don’t actually care about just to tick off “trend boxes.” Your energy belongs with the work you want to wake up for, not the work that drains you. For example, I still have no idea what Threads on Instagram is all about. Could it benefit me or my business? Maybe. But I’m not interested in spreading myself thin just to say I tried it.
Your skills and experience are highly transferable
The skills you develop during time away from the workforce are highly transferable, even if they don’t show up clearly on a CV. In a KPI-driven world, translating that experience can be the real challenge. To add to that difficulty- unremunerated work at home doesn’t exactly come with glowing references. So what are we to do?
Good question!.. How would I frame this when engaging with hiring managers or updating my resume?
Talk about the scope and scale of your responsibilities as if it were a regular office environment? How big is the “team” you “manage”? How complex are your operations? What are your decision-making responsibilities.
Oversaw long-term planning and daily operations for a multi-person household over a 6+ year period, coordinating schedules, logistics, education, and healthcare across multiple stakeholders. Managed competing priorities under time and resource constraints, adapting plans quickly in response to changing needs while maintaining consistency, structure, and reliability.
You can also add project examples:
Planned and executed multiple international relocations over the past 5 years, coordinating timelines, documentation, service providers, and family transitions while maintaining continuity of daily operations.
The last example isn’t as full as it could be, but you get the general idea of it, right? Home-based work is not dissimilar to office-based work. It’s a matter of how you frame it.
Opportunities for re-entering the workforce
In Abu Dhabi and across the UAE, women now have flexible, legitimate ways to re-enter the workforce. I help women every day choose paths that fit their personal context, including starting their own businesses.
The Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development offers several pathways to entrepreneurship, but none as simple or accessible as the Freelancer License. With a low cost and minimal administrative burden, it allows women to contribute their skills and experience confidently. It also affords amazing flexibility to keep on being present for their families.
My free Guide to Obtaining Your Freelancer License in Abu Dhabi is an excellent tool for you to springboard your journey from. I also have written another post called Freelancer License in Abu Dhabi: 5 Essential Things Every Solopreneur Should Know.
Final thoughts…
My key message is this: if you’re in Abu Dhabi or the UAE and thinking about re-entering the workforce after having been away for a while, any uncertainty you feel about the gap or your relevance is completely understandable. First of all- you’re always relevant. Furthermore, you’re now probably a seriously enhanced version of who you were when you left the workforce. And you can’t un-know what you know… so there’s that.
You got this! And you’re never alone… If you think you need a boost, don’t hesitate to reach out. My door is always open!
