The country's overseas employment surged by about 35 per cent in the nine months to September, led by Saudi Arabia.
The official figure showed that some 736,461 Bangladeshis found jobs abroad in the January- September period of 2017. The number of outbound workers was 546,275 in the same period last year.
Of the total number, some 412,397 workers went to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) with jobs in the last nine months, statistics available with the state-run Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET).
Oman recruited 66,073 workers, Qatar hired 64396, Kuwait 37,861 and Singapore 30,936 from Bangladesh in the last nine months of the year.
Besides, the outflow of workers to Malaysia increased in recent months. Some 49,307 workers went to the Southeast Asian country during this period.
Despite the increased outflow of workers, the inflow of remittances kept falling over the months.
Sector-insiders involved in the process said because of economic slowdown and political instability in Middle-Eastern countries, the job opportunities and income of workers declined notably.
According to the central bank statistics, the inflow of remittance was US$853.73 million in September 2017, down from $1.06 billion in September last year.
Presently, the outflow of Bangladeshi workers to Saudi Arabia is higher than the job demands there.
Nearly 90 per cent of the Bangladeshi workers went to the oil-rich country with "individual" visas where many of them are facing uncertainty of jobs, manpower recruiters said.
Besides, the number of outbound female workers dropped slightly during the period. In the last nine months, some 88,365 women workers went abroad with jobs, down by 3,119 to 91,484 in the corresponding period of 2016.
Due to tightening selection process, the number of female outbound workers has dropped, manpower recruiters and officials said.
"We have changed our strategy for sending female workers abroad as many of them were rejected in the past by the employers due to their poor skills," said Shameem Ahmed Chowdhury Noman, joint secretary-general of the Bangladesh Association of International Recruiting Agencies (BAIRA).
Now recruiters are cautious about sending female workers abroad, he added.
"We are now placing importance on sending skilled women workers so that they get good wages and other facilities," he said.
