Hi Nicola

I don't have experience of making this transition myself, but considering your situation from the perspective of a recruiter I think your difficulty will be convincing a recruiter that you could operate in the UK when all your experience is in what is perceived to be a radically different culture and legal system. I have employed two Australians and a New Zealander in my team in the past and in those cases was assured by the applicants that their employment law was based on UK employment law so they were confident of being able to operate in our framework. This turned out to be true in the main, but I kept a careful eye on any tricky ER situations.

Are you working for a local branch of a multi-national or a home-grown organisation? If you are in a home-grown organisation, does it employ large numbers of ex-pats and/or is it modelled on a western European or US organisation? These factors would make a big difference to how easy you would find the transition to working in HR in the UK.

Also, it occurs to me that although we talk glibly about "the middle east", there is a world of difference between e.g. Saudi Arabia and Israel.

There are other contributors to these threads who have international experience. Is there anyone out there who could help?