 Hi guys, you are watching Oxy Vlogs. If you are a woman who lives in Dubai and you feel frustrated with your career progress, you cannot find a job or probably you are a mom, you want to work, but you cannot afford a full-time job because you have to look after your kids. Watch this video because today I'm going to interview a friend of mine, Madina. She has her own company. She helps women to transform their lives and find a job of their dreams. And also she just got an award for Women's Unemployment Solutions. Hi, Madina. Thank you for your time and thank you for inviting us. Can you please introduce yourself and tell us about your life so far? Sure. Thank you so much, first of all, for coming and giving me the opportunity to have this wonderful interview. I'm really honored. And my name is Madina Arfadova. So I'm 32 years old. I've been in Dubai for the past 12 years. Originally, I'm from Ukraine, Odessa. I grew up there. And I moved to Dubai just like, you know, most of the, let's say expats with a dream to come and build a career. And I was always passionate about education sector. So when I came here, I was thinking that probably I'm going to go that path and follow the route of education sector. However, the first job in Dubai, you know, you rarely choose what you really want to do. It rather was something that came along the way. So I spent one year in retail like absolutely hated it because it's not my past. It's not my environment. So I had to quit that and go back at my master's degree. And then I came back and decided that no matter what, I want to stay in this country because I really feel good here. I see a lot of opportunities here for me. But also I decided that I will either go to the sector that I want to be in, or I'm just going to be patient and take my time. So it took me six months of job search until I got my first job in education. And then I passed the journey from receptionist to the CEO. Oh, that's amazing. Did you study in the UAE? Yes. I did my second master's degree in the UAE. So during my career, there were five years when I was working for University of Hulongong in Dubai. And during that time, I also studied master's of strategic marketing in the University of Hulongong in Dubai. So you can say that partly my education is from Dubai and from Australia, and partly it's still from Ukraine. Okay. I'm from Ukraine as well. Wonderful. And what is your goal and the biggest plans at the moment? At the moment, we are really focusing on helping as much women as we can in the UAE because there is this wrong image abroad and even internally that every woman who lives in the UAE, she has got for some reason more opportunities than other women abroad. However, the situation is a bit different. People don't really think about all kinds of situations, all kinds of circumstances that women land in here in Dubai. And our goal at Trice Assist is exactly to help those women who are stuck either in their career or they don't know which, let's say, next pass to choose after they got disappointed in the corporate sector or simply women who want to change their life by changing their career. Okay. I see. And what are the main obstacles and challenges have you had to overcome to get where you are at the moment? I think the biggest obstacles always exist in my mind, honestly. After some time, when I'm re-evaluating all the situation and I'm thinking how did I do this, going from receptionist to the CEO, I've asked myself so many times this question. In the beginning, I was always saying that it was lack of opportunities or lack of support. If I had maybe people who would guide me, if I maybe had some connections that would help me get a better promotion, but that was not the reason. The real reason, indeed, was lack of organization and lack of hard work. And it's not easy to admit that. And confidence. Yes. I mean, you know, confidence usually is arising when you are doing that hard work every day because you stop respecting yourself by seeing how far you've gone. And usually we are the biggest destroyers of our own confidence. And usually that happens when we don't achieve the goals that we set for ourselves. So the moment I realized that transformation, everything started changing because I did have the same knowledge that I could share with women maybe five or six years ago. But the reason that did not happen, you know, the reason I couldn't help all of these women is because me internally, I was not ready for that. I had to get ready for that internally first. Okay. And one of the main questions on my channel for my subscribers is how to find a job in Dubai. So what do you think about current job markets and what strategies would you advise will help them in a job search? That's a very good question. Actually, that's probably one of the most frequently asked questions of people who come to RISE Assist, you know, for free career consultations for the workshops. Everybody's asking this. So how can I get a job? Why the job market changed so much? Why it's so different right now than a few years ago? What's happening? So we've been studying this like from theoretical and practical point of view, meaning we've been reading and researching the secondary sources of data about this. But also we have first hand experience because maybe you don't know that some employers, they come to RISE Assist to get a referral from our graduates because they are looking for highly qualified specialists. So we actually have the first hand interaction with the employers and now we know the accurate reason, you know, why this is happening. So two and a half years ago, there was a big study going on in the Gulf and biggest HR agencies have grouped up to do a research of how much work do actually people do in Gulf during the working hours. And the data is available in the open access. Now the results were shocking. People roughly were working 50% of their working time. And, you know, employers started thinking because your biggest cost always is stuffing. And when you find out that the biggest cost is actually not used rationally, you start thinking probably something went wrong in that system. So that shift started happening together with the big industrial revolution, which is happening right now and the gig economy, right? And the me economy when people go for entrepreneurship. Therefore we are seeing big changes when employers want to get highly qualified specialists who do not require training, who will come and start doing work immediately and also teach the other staff members best practices. And it's not easy to find someone like that in a huge pool of candidates. Reason number two, very high competition. So another study in the UAE suggests that nine out of 10 people at the moment in the UAE, whether employed or unemployed, are looking for another career opportunity, which means 90% of population is on the job hunt, which makes the job market extremely, extremely competitive. Therefore you always need to stay up to date, upgraded, but also work on your network. Like nothing's going to bring you better results than your network, up to date skills, you know, up to date knowledge. And also one of the things that I would like to share with your subscribers, because very few people actually use this tool in the modern era, is your visibility as a job seeker. Like a lot of people, they follow the old pattern, you know, when you send the CV and you wait for the response. But this doesn't work anymore, right? You have to stand out from the crowd. And what's the tool to stand out from the crowd is your expert positioning and visibility. You kind of have to stand out in front of the recruiter or employer in the right time, let's say in the right frame. In the right moment. Yes, exactly. And I know that LinkedIn I think is the best way now to find a job. Absolutely. I honestly think that LinkedIn, but also blogging, professional blogging. I think that like, if you really consider yourself an expert, you want to get noticed, why don't you blog about your expertise? It doesn't take much time. Plus, if you're really an expert, you probably have so much knowledge to share. But that allows people to see how professional you are. There is another research story. I'm loading you with the data, but I think it's very important for your subscribers to understand their realities, because people rarely go and, you know, actually investigate why this is happening. So another data suggests that at the moment, 78% of recruiters prefer to reach out to candidates instead of receiving the CVs, which means there is around 70% of vacancies which are hidden, which are not advertised, because it's much easier to go and hunt the candidate rather than screen through 2000 plus CVs. So it becomes extremely time consuming because people are frustrated, they are applying everywhere. So both parties, you know, recruitment and employees, they are hitting this big wall where now they need to somehow work out the system when they are going to understand each other, let's say. Yeah, I know I was reading about it. You have to use certain keywords in your application. Absolutely. So it's easier to find you according to the criteria. Yes, and also I think they need to kind of understand that targeted approach really right now makes everything much faster and much effective. So people use the blanket approach, right, when they send CVs to everyone, put interested under each post and blanket approach did not work, I mean, since, since a couple of years. So doing that is actually harming your job search instead of helping it. But what will actually work? Let's say you are looking for a job in administration, you also consider marketing, you also can consider sales because like you're really in the situation when you need to kind of start working. So it's not right to have one CV. For all kind of positions. For three kind of positions, right? If you are looking, if like if you have a broad, let's say broad line of the positions that you would apply for, create three CVs and then send the right CV to the relevant position because that way people will see that it kind of aligned because when you're applying for a position of executive assistant and you are saying that I'm very experienced marketing or sales person, it's alarming. I mean I don't think anybody is going to actually spend more than two seconds to read through the CV until the end. Yeah, that's true. And if I'm not mistaken, there is a special system in the company that screens the CVs. That's right. Yeah, there is an automatic. It picks special keywords and then based on that keywords it ranks the applicants. So 80% I think of applications even is not seen by a human. Absolutely right. So the initial screening goes through the artificial intelligence where it picks up the keywords from the CV. However, I was surprised to learn that you know all these applications when you are submitting for the big companies like Majitan Fatim and yeah when you're spending one hour on submitting that application, you're thinking why is it so long, right? Yeah. But the secret is the artificial intelligence actually pays more attention to that submitted application than your CV itself. And that is why I would advise the job seekers to actually spend sort of time not to just skim through but fill those applications carefully because for example, when I started working in the University of Wollongong and I had the interview, my future boss showed me the papers that he had on his table and it wasn't my CV. It was my application that I have submitted manually. So a lot of people, you know, they think that kind of you know, nobody reads that. But in fact, that is more red than your actual CV itself. Okay, now let's move to Rise Assist. Sure. Can you tell us about your company and what courses do you provide? Sure. So Rise Assist is a business training center for women. So we only train women through two different programs. First one is for executive assistance and personal assistance. And we specifically train executive assistants to see suit executives and high net worth individuals like celebrity level personal assistants. So that program is a very interesting transformational journey which goes in five cycles. Like we completely transform the mindset of our students going from just an employee to careerist. We are teaching them how to plan their career and transform their role because the biggest fear of executive assistance is that you know, I'll stay an executive assistant forever and I'll never get a promotion. So we're teaching them how not to do that. And also we are equipping them with 32. I think at the moment it's 32 in demand skillset. And also we are teaching them the updated software. Because for some reason, some executive assistants, they still have in their CVs Microsoft Word or Microsoft Office, you know, as the biggest technological knowledge level, which at the moment is not really suitable. I mean, if you want that high level job, you know, and high level salary bracket, that's definitely not enough. And also we are teaching them during this program how to be like super productive and also how to make your boss a super productive person. Because also I'll give the tip to your audience, whoever wants to become an executive assistant. Executive assistant is someone who makes the life of their boss easier. Someone who can save their time and money. That's the primary reason people hire executive assistants. And if you're still behind, you know, the recent systems and techniques, of course, you can't really consider yourself competitive to the other people who are keeping themselves up to date. So the results of this program usually are quite fast, because we started receiving more and more referrals from the corporate sector. People are coming to us and saying, we want to hire your graduate because we've heard a lot about them. You know, the social media started being quite explosive about this. So our graduates, like 90% of them, they find a job within one month, 1.5 months after finishing the course. And that's like a dream job. Yeah, that's quite fast. Yeah. We consider that like a super fast rate. And in general, you know, in training industry, people rarely implement everything they learn immediately. I think what we have achieved with this program is we showed them that this really works by the examples of others. And now they are motivated to go immediately and apply to get, you know, the same results. If you don't mind, I would share the recent story from the February. It's amazing because like, we're very proud of this student. So we had a mom of two who came to our course in February, and it was an express course. It was one week course, which is like full time from 10 to 5. So she has studied like the full week. And she was out of the job market for such a long time. And she was thinking that she's going to take the course, update the skills and then start slowly searching for a job. But because she was so eager, you know, to have the result, she told us in the beginning of the course, I want a success story like the ones I'm seeing on your website to happen to me. And after the course ended, it was on Tuesday, she has sent me a WhatsApp with an offer letter. And I've asked her, how did you manage to do this? And she said, you know, I've just done everything you taught me. And also I invited one of my mentors, he is a dream job expert, career coach. He gave them a workshop in the last day of the course. So he was teaching them how to tune their CV, how to approach to the recruiters, how to make your LinkedIn profile visible. She said, I just implemented everything you in a day said and this is the result. And now she works here on the ground floor as a school manager. So literally she came to the course in February. She has passed this journey from February till March and she started working this week as a school manager because after the executive assistant course, she didn't want to stop. And she took immediately our business training program. And that's when she got another offer and she got hired as a school manager in Music Institute down there. That's an amazing story. It's like five days. Yeah. I mean, we have a lot of stories like that, but this was the fastest one. And given that she was a mom with two kids out of the job market for such a long time, I think this is like the rocket result, probably the biggest record we have ever seen. And what kind of school is there? It's a Music Institute. Music Institute. Yeah. And it's funny that when she came, she has put a post. We have this closed community group. So when people are joining new students, they're putting welcome posts. So she wrote in her post, she said, I just want any job in admin because like I really need to start earning. If I could choose, I would work in a school as an admin. And when she came to receive her certificate two days ago, I told her, do you remember that post? And she said, isn't it? I wrote a school and I said, look, now you're a school manager. So the moral of the story is that, you know, when you start believing in yourself and you start implementing, you just have to shift your life 360 degrees. And it's not always about you having a certain skill set or not. It's about bringing it out, framing it and knowing how to present it and how to use your potential to lend a dream career. Okay. And can you tell us more about virtual assistants? Of course. It's very interesting. Very interesting, right? So virtual assistant is a very old concept in the USA and Europe. Basically, who are virtual assistants? They are business support specialists. You can call them freelancers, but we prefer to call them solopreneurs because all the rules of entrepreneurship apply. So virtual assistants is a business that you run providing services to businesses, entrepreneurs and companies in a remote mode, which means you could do for them. I mean, there are more than 72 niches of virtual assistants. There are niches in marketing, sales, admin, bookkeeping, content writing, blogging, book writing, ghost writing, email marketing, design. Absolutely. All of those niches are basically belonging to virtual assistants. So any kind of support or help running a business a virtual assistant can do. So the only difference is you don't work full time. You don't have a contract. You work part time. So basically, it's business to business collaboration because virtual assistants is a small business. Even though it's a remote one, still you need to kind of lead it as a business owner. Otherwise, you know, all the challenges with freelancing start appearing. So students who come to us for virtual assistant program, they are either disappointed in the corporate sector. They don't want to work for someone anymore. We call them unemployable. You know, they find themselves unemployable. And the other category are moms. So, you know, in this country, leaving your kids is not affordable to all the women, right? And many women are sacrificing their career to stay at home with their kids. So there come a time when they think that, you know, I would like to earn, but I don't want to leave my kids. So what's the options? Unfortunately, in Dubai, there are not many flexible working options. So they always look at this option of becoming a virtual assistant, because you can work from your own home, set your own availability and choose your own niche. Basically, it's an opportunity to utilize your passion, your skills, and use your free time to earn some money. But most importantly, it's not about money, to be honest. We found after many training, many groups that it's about self-confidence, accomplishment, and how they are changing, you know, their behavior even internally and externally. They kind of start respecting themselves more. They start engaging with the other women who started just like them, and it gives them power. It gives them self-confidence. Exactly. And I think the biggest transformation that they experience with this course is that they start understanding that no matter how their life is going to change from now on, they always will be able to learn and earn. And that feeling probably is more precious than actually earning money. Yeah, but I think that virtual assistant role requires a lot of self-discipline as well and hard work. Absolutely. It's very difficult just to lose track of your job if you are working from home. You know, training virtual assistants is always much more deep than training executive assistants, because when we train executive assistants, we mold perfect employees, mold perfect assistants who will in future become managers. But when you train virtual assistants, it's much more difficult because you train entrepreneurs. And what we teach them is not only how to stay and support, you know, a business. We teach them how to start this way and eventually build your own legacy, you know, build your own business. So all rules of business building, let's say, apply. And that's why this program is much more complicated. So we start with entrepreneurial mindset transformation. When we need to take them out of the employee mode and make them stop thinking as a business owner, that includes a long-term thinking that includes eliminating, complaining, self-motivation, then we proceed to organization. As you said, it's so difficult to manage your own time. You know, it's funny, like most of people, they start this virtual assistant thing or any solopreneurship thinking that when I will work on my own, I can stay home in pajamas, you know, and just do whatever I like, wake up whenever I like, be my own boss. So I would like to explain that being your own boss includes responsibilities, not only the freedom. And unfortunately, nobody tells you that when you're starting a business, right? So when you're working in a corporate sector, there is always a manager who is like checking on you, you know, who is appreciating you. When you're working alone, none of this is happening. And, you know, before you start this journey, probably you will understand me because you're kind of also doing something similar. When you are just starting, you're thinking that, okay, when I'll be doing something on my own, I'll be so pumped to wake up and just crush it. And when it's starting, it's not happening. And you're thinking, why? I was so eager to start something on my own. And now I have this opportunity, but I still wake up in the same mood, you know, when I was still employed. Why it's happening? Because the mindset stayed the same. You did not learn how to push yourself every day. You did not understand why it's important for you. And you did not understand how to actually build that system. When you are turning your day into a money making machine. You know, so in our productivity modules, we're learning how to even start your day in the right way, how to wake up your brain in the right day, how to structure your day to make the maximum out of it. Because when you are a solopreneur, you have only two assets, your skills and your time. You usually don't have money. That's why you need to make money using those two assets. Exactly. Then we are of course proceeding to the skills learning. So what we teach them in the skills section, we start with graphic design, like how to make their own logos, you know, branding materials, how to build their own websites, and then social media strategies, how to do the digital advertising, how to manage social media platforms, how to write blogs, you know, how to create their own channels, how to do the email marketing, webinars, how to create their own online schools and courses. There are more than like also 32 skills that they learn during that part, but most importantly, they learn technical tools, software. Because for a solopreneur technology, again, becomes very important as you can't outsource. You are alone. Your outsourcing becomes technology. Instead of hiring a personal assistant, you pay for an app or instead of, you know, hiring a bookkeeper, you got the fresh books or something like that. So we basically take them through all the stages and we finalize the program with a stage when they learn how to sell and market their services, put their clients on retainer and scale. Like, scaling is very important because I don't want my students to stay in the virtual assistance mode because eventually that's not scalable. That's like trading your time for money. But when you scale your business, the eventual goal of every entrepreneur should be number one, solve one problem for the community, you know, take the responsibility for that program, like make the world a better place. And second is how to work less and earn more. Because when you reach that stage, you now can help more people only when you are okay. So the eventual goal is to make them reach that stage. So to share with you some results from the virtual assistant solopreneur program, by the way, we have in that program not only virtual assistants, but we have bloggers, coaches, we have shop owners, we have makeup shop owners, you know, makeup influencers. There is such a widespread of profiles that come to us, personal stylists, travel consultancies. So in our last intake, which literally graduated 10 days ago, we had an amazing seven business ideas, which are now in call to action and few of them already are running. So one of them is our student, Azia Shafi. She is a famous Instagram beauty influencer. And she is now building her own online school where women can feel empowered through feeling beautiful every day, even on a budget. And the other student is starting a travel consultancy. She also has a blog on YouTube, her name is Cassie, the explorer, you know, on your website. So they're starting a travel consultancy, which is a very boutique and niche idea. The name of the consultancy travels by best friends. And why is it unique? Because they will not only provide the travel packages, but also they will teach people how to create their own footages and they will combine it into a travel memory movie. So they want to create travel bloggers. Yes. Well, you know, when people are traveling somewhere, they always are doing this for two reasons, right? Experience and memory. So they will help them with both by creating a memory for them, right? And also they paired with another student from the same group. And this is the power of the course. They form such interesting collaborations. And sometimes it ends up in partnerships, you know, joint ventures, which is amazing. So they partnered with another student who is a personal stylist. And now there will be a value added service that if you're traveling for business or for an occasion, a personal stylist is actually going to prepare your suitcase with you. It's all inclusive, right? And when they finish the course, they provide them with a certified diploma. Yeah. So we are accredited by Trust Cert Canada, the governmental accreditation organization. So now we have this double certification process when they will receive a certificate from Rhizocyst on completion, but also they will receive the second one after two weeks after it comes back from Canada. And that will be internationally recognized and certified. That's good. And like, do you have any partnership with the recruitment companies in Dubai? Yeah, we've recently signed a partnership with the Innovative Recruitment Platform, which is called Leap Recruitment. So we use artificial intelligence to generate the best selection of the candidates and employers. And we are planning on providing more and more support to our graduates with employability. However, at this point, it will sound unbelievable, but only roughly 18% of our graduates still did not succeed to build their dream careers even without the support of the recruitment companies. However, we are planning to host career events. So the next one is going to be coming literally in a week. It's a career clinic event when anyone can come and get advice on their CV profile, you know, skill set aligned with their career goal. And we are planning also to join forces and spread more words through our channels to more and more potential employers who will reach out to us for referral for our graduates. That's interesting. And we'll pass by please anytime. And what advice would you give to a woman who is planning to open a business from scratch in Dubai? And if she doesn't have a budget? Yeah, unfortunately, this is the situation with most of the people, you know, they want to start something. The desire is there. They want to create their own freedom, their own financial independence, but they don't know how to start or they doubt this will work or they don't know if it's possible without budget. So I'm going to tell upfront it's possible without budget because I have started with zero budget. Thank you very much. I think we covered all the most important questions. Thank you, Medina for sharing your experience. Of course it does. And guys, if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below. And thank you for watching. I will see you in the next video. Bye bye. Bye bye.