GCC strategy roles grow as companies build in-house rather than call consultants

Strategy hiring across the GCC turned positive in 3Q 2026 for the first time in roughly 10 quarters, and the recovery is going to in-house corporate teams, not to consultancies, Cooper Fitch CEO Trefor Murphy tells EnterpriseAM.

Strategy roles, whose function is similar to roles usually contracted out to consultants, grew 6% q-o-q, according to the Cooper Fitch 3Q 2026 Gulf Employment Index seen by EnterpriseAM. The recovery includes senior-level appointments, reversing the cautious attitude towards senior levels that businesses took through 1H 2026 as they prioritized delivering existing initiatives over new strategic work.

But don’t write off the consulting jobs just yet. The recruitment agency still expects the consulting sector to begin partially recovering in 2027. “I don’t think it’ll ever get back up to where it was in 2021-2023, but I think it’ll show some of the 2018 or 2019 kind of size and scale,” Murphy says.

REMEMBER- Consulting work is facing AI-driven pressures even prior to the war after gigaproject plans in Saudi Arabia drove a surge in demand for the top global players. Source Global Research (SGR), a London-based analyst firm that tracks the professional services industry, had the GCC consulting market at USD 8.3 bn in 2025, growing 12% y-o-y — a slowdown from 13.3% in 2024, with two-thirds of GCC clients allocating more than 30% of their 2025 consulting budgets to AI adoption. The Gulf market is “beginning to shed some of the breakneck speed of its earlier expansion,” said SGR senior research analyst Dane Albertelli. “AI is creating greater efficiencies for doing consulting, but it’s not driving demand for more consulting,” SGR co-founder Fiona Czerniawska told Axios earlier this summer.

The surge in strategy hiring comes as overall hiring in the Gulf recovers in 3Q, driven mostly by UAE and Saudi activity. GCC hiring overall rose 2% in 3Q, reversing a 3% contraction in 2Q, with the UAE doing nearly all the work at 4% growth and Saudi Arabia the only other sizable positive contributor at 1.5%. Oman was marginally up at 0.5%. Qatar (-1%), Kuwait (-2%), and Bahrain (-2%) each shrank, with Kuwait and Bahrain hiring contracting for the second consecutive quarter, driven mostly by a conflict cooldown, Murphy adds.

But the case in Qatar is more structural than cyclical: “They’re not necessarily pushing for job creation. They’re pushing for wealth creation. And everything they do has a long-term nature to it. Jobs aren’t their priority,” he tells us, pointing to Qatar’s smaller population.

By the sector

Hiring was concentrated on resuming paused searches and securing specialist capability rather than broad expansion. Energy led all sectors at 7%, as mandates stalled during the war returned, powered by a multi-year Saudi unconventional gas services contract awarded in July and USD 8.2 bn in construction contracts for a UAE gas processing expansion in August.

ICYMI- We previously reported that firms were running searches to the final stage and then not making the hire, with mandates piling up unclosed as the stop-start rhythm of the war ate away at hiring confidence. In 3Q, those searches began to close. “A lot of stuff went on hold and came back online in 3Q,” Murphy tells us, adding that fresh mandates also went on hold by the end of the quarter.

Saudization-driven demand also helped prop up GCC finance sector numbers, with the sector’s overall hiring rising 5% and senior positions up by 6% as demand for Saudi accountants rose on Saudization deadlines. Software (4%) and cloud (2%) also returned to growth after 2Q declines, as firms reopened searches they had deferred during the war.

The surprise swing happened in investment management, which moved from 6% growth in 2Q to a 5% contraction in 3Q — a move Murphy attributes to earlier over-hiring and the regional IPO drought rather than the war. “They’ve had two very busy quarters before now, and I’d say they’ve gotten ahead of their hiring plans,” he says. “We’ve had no IPO activity, since that’s a big subsector within the overall frame of investment management for us.”

Full recovery is not here yet

While 3Q is showing recovery, the full year figures could remain negative. “If we didn’t have the conflict, we probably would have seen job growth between 4 and 5% this year across the GCC. Now we have a negative number,” he tells us. “That could be four, five, six percentage points lower than we expected. That’s a massive adjustment in a market that was moving a particular direction. And that is all conflict-related.”

And 4Q is more likely to not follow the same recovery track of 3Q: “A number of big entities have asked us to slow down completely or put a pause on stuff,” Murphy says. “That’ll predominantly hit October’s numbers and into November, December.”

Confidence is the biggest factor behind this — and it’s the one that the war hit the most: “Recruitment and inflation; there’s no correlation. Recruitment and central bank activity, no correlation. Recruitment and confidence is the biggest factor.” A period of relative calm across the region in the summer restored enough confidence to make September the strongest hiring month in 3Q, with growth concentrated in the quarter’s last five weeks. The first six weeks of the quarter had seen none of the usual seasonal pickup, Murphy adds. The Cooper Fitch report notes that by September, UAE new export business was growing at its fastest pace in almost two years.

UAE could — just barely — become the growth exception in 4Q: Cooper expects Saudi hiring to contract “for sure” in 4Q as Houthi attacks on the Kingdom escalate, with Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain shrinking for a third consecutive quarter and Oman holding flat. “It causes an overhang in confidence for the rest of the GCC,” he adds. “I could see UAE maybe flat or maybe a small percentage up for 4Q.”