Dubai's Emirates to hire 20,000 employees in next 5 years

Dubai’s Emirates airline plans to recruit 20,000 more employees in the next five years.

“We continue to hire to meet our needs as we will receive more aircraft, which will be deployed to new destinations or current routes to increase frequency. Over the next decade, we will need to recruit close to 20,000 operational staff, including cabin crew, pilots, engineers, technicians, and airport staff. We have marked up our requirements in terms of opening new destinations, receiving a new aircraft,” Adel Al Redha, Deputy President and Chief Operations Officer at Emirates, told Khaleej Times.

Emirates Group had 124,000 employees at the end of the 2024-25 financial year. Replying to a query about challenges in hiring qualified professionals, Al Redha said Dubai’s carrier doesn’t face any such issue in attracting the best talent within and outside the UAE.

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“In all honesty, I don’t have experience at Emirates. We have been able to recruit through our own programme. We also have people applying within the UAE and outside the country. There are no difficulties in securing staff for these jobs. We are lucky to be in the UAE and Dubai, as this country and city offer safety and security to the candidates.”

The airline is also recruiting UAE nationals as part of its Emiratisation programme to accommodate more citizens in its growing workforce.

“We have different programmes to qualify UAE nationals in engineering, management, IT and cadet programmes. We injected this time, based on the capacity in the engineering and cadet programmes, about 120 nationals per year. We plan to increase it by increasing our training capacity. It's similar for the other programmes, such as IT and management. We also hire graduates and deploy them across the network for various managerial roles,” he added.

Al Redha said Emirates Group recorded “very good performance” in the first half of its 2025-26 financial year.

“We continue to see high demand into and out of Dubai across all of our destinations. On the back of this demand and the need to travel, we continued to invest further. We are uplifting various elements, whether it’s in the air or on the ground, in terms of catering, accessories of aircraft, set up we have on the ground. We continue our investment journey,” he added.