Deputy Business Development Director - Rail; Place and Regional Development

What if you could do the kind of work the world needs?

At WSP, you can access our global scale, contribute to landmark projects and connect with the brightest minds in your field to do the best work of your life. You can embrace your curiosity in a culture that celebrates new ideas and diverse perspectives. You can experience a world of opportunity and the chance to shape a career as unique as you.

Our Rail business is seeking a Deputy Business Development Director – Rail:
Place and Regional Development to lead Rail's engagement with the evolving place and regional development agenda across the UK. As investment, influence and accountability increasingly move towards mayoral strategic authorities, combined authorities, local government and regional transport bodies, you will build trusted relationships, market insight and integrated propositions needed to shape place-led rail investment and deliver sustainable growth.

Reporting to the Business Development Director – Rail, you will focus on emerging and established regional clients and the partners through whom rail propositions are developed and delivered. You will connect Rail capability with WSP’s wider Local Government, Transport, Advisory, Planning, Environment and Property expertise, presenting a coordinated OneWSP proposition.

You will work closely with Group Directors, client and account leads, Regional Growth Leads, Strategic Growth Directors and WSP’s Local Government Sector leadership to identify emerging programmes early, understand regional policy and funding priorities, shape client propositions and convert market intelligence into a visible, qualified pipeline. In short, bringing structure to the complexity into which we face.

The role provides leadership and connection into WSP’s Local Government Sector and Regional Growth structures; it does not replace them or own every regional authority account. Instead, it will ensure that rail-focused propositions, relationships and opportunities are coordinated through existing Rail and Local Government governance and pipeline arrangements. The role focuses on market development, relationship building and opportunity shaping. Once opportunities become defined strategic pursuits, leadership transfers to the Strategic Growth Director through established capture governance.

This is a highly visible leadership role within the Rail business, providing direction and coordination across WSP's devolution and regional growth agenda. Success will come through building trusted relationships, connecting capability across the business and helping colleagues identify, shape and convert emerging opportunities into sustainable growth.

Market leadership & strategy

• Lead our engagement with the UK&I place and regional development agenda.
• Build and maintain a view of emerging investment priorities, funding mechanisms and policy drivers across strategic authorities, local government and regional transport bodies.
• Represent WSP in relevant place-making, regional growth, transport and economic development forums.
• Translate regional intelligence into actionable opportunities and investment choices for the Rail business.

Client engagement & market development

• Build senior relationships with mayoral strategic authorities, combined authorities, local authorities, regional transport bodies and place-based delivery organisations, while supporting interfaces with Network Rail / Great British Railways.
• Develop engagement plans for established and emerging strategic authorities, with named relationships, intelligence priorities, routes to market and agreed actions.
• Identify emerging rail propositions before they become conventional procurement…