What I Prepared For and What Surprised Me
When my family and I relocated to Riyadh in early 2025, I had prepared for the practical challenges: finding housing in a good school catchment area, sorting out the residency paperwork, researching the business registration requirements, lining up initial meetings before we arrived. I thought I was reasonably well prepared.
What I was not prepared for was how different the texture of professional life would be. Not in ways that are better or worse than the Canadian professional environment I came from — just genuinely different in ways that take time to understand and genuinely adapt to, not just intellectually acknowledge.
Decision-Making Pace
The pace of organizational decision-making in the Saudi private and semi-private sector surprised me. When the right principal is in the room with genuine authority to act, decisions that would take weeks of committee review in a Canadian government context can happen in hours. For someone who spent years managing projects within Metrolinx’s governance framework — a structure designed for a provincial government agency with accountability to elected officials and public scrutiny — that speed is genuinely exhilarating.
What takes longer is trust development. Business relationships in Saudi Arabia follow a different trajectory than their Canadian equivalents. In Toronto you can often move from initial meeting to commercial discussion in a relatively compressed timeline if the professional fit is clear. In Riyadh, the relationship needs to be established before business becomes a natural topic. That is not a cultural barrier. It is a different sequence — one where the investment in understanding each other as people comes first, and the professional collaboration follows naturally from that foundation. Professionals who try to skip that stage consistently underperform those who invest in it.
The Language of Informal Relationships
I arrived thinking that language would be my most significant barrier. I do not speak Arabic. I assumed that would be a constant obstacle in a country where Arabic is the language of government, daily life, and cultural life.
In practice, the professional infrastructure and construction sector in Riyadh operates largely in English at the senior level. The language barrier I encounter is not in the formal meeting. It is in the informal conversation before and after the meeting — the human texture of relationship-building that happens in Arabic and that I cannot fully participate in. That matters more than I initially appreciated. Context gets built and relationships deepen in those informal moments. My Arabic deficit is felt there in a way it is not in the meeting room itself.
My adjustment has been to invest in being present for those informal moments even when I cannot fully participate linguistically — to listen, to watch, to ask questions when appropriate, and to acknowledge honestly what I am still learning. It is a slower path. But it has been a more genuine one.
Physical Scale and Ambition
The physical scale of ambition in Riyadh has recalibrated my professional reference frame in ways that are difficult to convey without experiencing it directly. In Canada, a major infrastructure program at CAD 500 million is considered transformational. In Riyadh, programs at that scale are mid-tier. NEOM, Diriyah Gate, Red Sea Project, Qiddiya — these programs are operating at a scale that has no parallel anywhere else in the world right now.
That recalibration changes what I bring to conversations. The framework I used for thinking about program complexity, risk management, and delivery governance needed to expand to match the scale of what is being attempted here. That expansion has been among the most professionally valuable aspects of the move.
What I Would Tell Other Professionals Considering the Move
It is more rewarding than it is difficult. But it is genuinely both. The professional opportunity in Riyadh for infrastructure and project management professionals with deep technical capability and the patience to build relationships properly is real and substantial. The scale of programs being delivered here creates demand for expertise that the Kingdom cannot yet fully supply domestically.
Commit fully or do not come. The difference between professionals who are genuinely present in the market — living here, building relationships here, integrating into the city — and professionals who are passing through is visible and felt. My family is settled. My wife teaches. The children are in school. That commitment changes the quality of every professional relationship I have built here.
Be patient with yourself and with the market. The recalibration takes time, and it should. A market that is building at this scale and this pace deserves professional humility from those of us who are learning it.