WSP Global has appointed Rob Kettlety to its Middle East Executive Committee, giving the engineering and professional services consultancy a dedicated voice for client strategy on the leadership body that steers its regional business. The appointment was announced on 7 October alongside a second addition to the committee.
Kettlety takes his seat as Executive Director, Clients and Growth. He has spent 16 years with the firm, working across commercial, operational and client-facing leadership roles, and his remit on the committee is to strengthen client relationships, identify growth opportunities and connect the firm's technical expertise to the complex programmes its clients are running across the region.
Speaking about the appointment, Kettlety said the firm wants to be the partner of choice on the region's most ambitious programmes and projects. Dean McGrail, President for the Middle East and Asia, said the appointments reflect the strength of the business and its ambitions for the future.
The second appointment announced at the same time was Emma Wyatt, Senior Vice President for Marketing and Communications across Europe, the Middle East, India, Africa and Asia, who joins the committee while retaining her regional remit. Taken together, the two appointments widen the committee beyond its traditional engineering and operations base to include client development and external communications, a composition that tracks the way large consultancies in the Gulf increasingly win work through long-run client relationships rather than individual bids.
The move comes as the consultancy continues to expand across the Middle East, where governments in the Gulf are running some of the largest capital programmes in the world across transport, utilities, giga-projects and social infrastructure. Firms competing for that work have been building out regional leadership structures with real decision-making authority rather than running the region as an outpost of a European head office, and the addition of a clients and growth seat to the committee is a visible expression of that shift.
Kettlety's long tenure with the firm is notable in a regional market where senior consultancy talent moves frequently between competitors, and where a change of account lead can cost a firm a framework it spent years building. Promoting from within at committee level gives the business continuity of client knowledge at a point when several of the region's largest programmes are moving from design into delivery, the phase at which client relationships are most often tested and at which commercial disputes most often begin. It also puts the person who owns those relationships in the room when resourcing and bid decisions are taken, rather than downstream of them.
