LEADERSHIP INTERVIEW
Wissam Ayoub,
MBA, P.Eng. Senior Vice President, Middle East and North Africa (MENA)
1. Can you tell us about your career with EllisDon and how your role has evolved? I started with EllisDon in Toronto in December 2005. I was studying for my MBA at the Schulich School of Business and I took a course about Project Management. The CIO of EllisDon back then was giving a presentation about EdgeBuilder (currently called Gate 3) which is EllisDon’s in-house Project Management software. I chatted with him and asked him to help me schedule an interview with EllisDon’s VP of Operations in Toronto, Suheil Khouri, to answer a few questions about my end-of-program project around condo development in the GTA, and construction challenges. I met Suheil few days later and it turned out that he was interviewing me and not the other way around. He offered me a job at EllisDon
knowing that I still had few months to go with my MBA and this is how my career started at EllisDon. I had to start on December 19, 2005 and it couldn’t wait till the new year. My first position with EllisDon was an Assistant Project Manager at the Brampton Civic Hospital which was the first P3 hospital in Ontario. I then moved as a PM to the Bay Adelaide Tower project in downtown Toronto. I later got the opportunity to join the P3 Development department at EllisDon as a Bid Manager working on the Woodstock General Hospital P3 project as well as the Toronto South Detention Center. I continued progressing in my career to become a Bid Director then a Project Director winning flagship P3 projects such as the New Oakville Hospital and the Ottawa LRT project.
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In 2013 I was approached by EllisDon’s Senior VP International, Michael Smith, asking if I wanted to move to Dubai to co-manage EllisDon’s operations in the region. That was another key decision in my career and it was a hard one for me. I was well established in Toronto working on mega-projects and had bought a minivan to have enough space for our third kid. who was due in few months, but I always enjoyed challenges and my wife Rima was fully supportive. We moved to Dubai mid-2013 and I initially co-managed the Middle East region for EllisDon as Vice President and Area Manager and was recently promoted to Senior VP for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in charge of the whole region.
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