By: Abdullah Alnabhan – Managing Director, Middle East
When Saudi Arabia’s new requirement for 70% Saudization of project management roles takes effect in February 2027, much of the discussion will rightfully focus on compliance, workforce planning and recruitment.
Those are important conversations, but the reality is that Saudi Arabia doesn’t have enough Saudi project managers for the volume and complexity of megaprojects the Kingdom is undertaking. What it does have is the world’s best environment in which to create them.
Few places today offer young professionals anything approaching the concentration of complex project experience available in the Kingdom. New cities and urban districts are taking shape. Rail, aviation, water and other infrastructure networks are expanding. Major energy and industrial investments are underway alongside tourism, hospitality and cultural developments.
The result is a real-world training ground for a generation of project professionals.
What Silicon Valley became for software, Saudi Arabia has an opportunity to become for project leadership.
Experience is the scarce resource
Technical education and professional qualifications matter enormously, but the judgement required to lead a major programme comes from experience: managing interfaces between contractors, resolving competing stakeholder priorities, understanding schedule and cost pressures, making decisions with imperfect information and seeing how choices made during planning play out years later in construction and operations.
Those capabilities take time to develop because professionals need sufficiently complex projects on which to develop them. Saudi Arabia has those projects in abundance. The challenge is ensuring enough young Saudi professionals get meaningful exposure to them.
As localization requirements increase, competition for experienced Saudi professionals will inevitably increase too. Recruiting someone who already has the necessary experience may solve an immediate workforce need for one company, but companies cannot collectively recruit their way to a larger talent pool by competing for the same people.
The industry has to create more experienced people. That means treating Saudization as a capability-building strategy, not simply a workforce requirement.
The formula is straightforward, even if delivering it takes commitment: Hire earlier. Train deliberately. Put young professionals close to difficult problems. Pair them with people who have spent decades solving those problems. Give them genuine responsibility and a visible path to leadership.
Done at scale, this is the way to dramatically expand the number of Saudi professionals accumulating meaningful delivery experience early in their careers.
From knowledge transfer to knowledge creation
International expertise has an important role in this transition. Saudi Arabia is undertaking projects of a scale and complexity that benefit from lessons learned across global infrastructure markets.
But international firms should increasingly judge their contribution not only by the expertise they bring into the Kingdom, but by the expertise they help build within it.
At Hill International and GISI Consulting Group, we recently made one such investment by establishing a Saudi engineering centre of excellence designed to recruit and develop 200 recent Saudi engineering graduates over three years.
Participants undertake a structured two-year development pathway combining technical training, mentorship, project rotations and direct participation in client-facing work. They gain experience in project controls, planning and stakeholder coordination while working on real infrastructure assignments in sectors including water, aviation and rail.
The objective is bigger than meeting a localization percentage. We want young Saudi engineers to move from university into meaningful project roles, from technical competence into project leadership, and eventually into positions where they are developing the professionals who follow them.
For decades, localization in emerging infrastructure markets has been discussed in terms of “knowledge transfer”: experienced international professionals transferring expertise to local colleagues. Saudi Arabia has the opportunity to go further.
A generation of Saudi professionals is gaining experience on projects that have few equivalents anywhere in the world. Over time, they will not simply absorb global best practice. They will create new expertise in delivering complex projects at scale.
A talent legacy that travels
The physical legacy will be easy to see: transport systems, buildings, utilities, industrial facilities and new urban districts. The human-capital legacy could travel much further.
By the 2030s, Saudi Arabia could have thousands of professionals with precisely the kind of experience infrastructure owners around the world are struggling to find. Some will lead the Kingdom’s next generation of projects. Some may lead Saudi companies expanding internationally. Others may take their expertise into projects elsewhere in the Gulf and around the world.
That is how an employment policy can become something considerably more powerful: an engine for building globally competitive professional capability.
For companies operating in Saudi Arabia, the implication is immediate. The February 2027 requirement is a signal to invest now.
Saudi Arabia is already building some of the world’s most ambitious infrastructure. If industry gets the talent equation right, the Kingdom could build something just as valuable alongside it: one of the world’s deepest pools of project leadership talent.