Following a vibrant 2008 and 6 months in 2009, the market has started to cool down. There has been news about a wave of redundancies within contractor and consultant organizations. According to one of the Architects employed by a prominent Consultancy office, the Muscat branch has made 25 engineers and technicians redundant in a single week.

This situation is likely to worsen across the next year as the prospects of new work looks very bleak at the moment.

The majority of the people made redundant are foreigners who were given just weeks of notice to either find another job locally or pack up and go. With the economic climate in neighboring GCC countries not being any better, the majority of the people have no option but to go back home and settle down there.

Many people in the industry expected that by this time of the year a number of projects which were shelved last year will be tendered, however this did not seemed to be the case as majority of the projects which relied on project finance which almost diminished due to the effects of the credit crunch.