Niels VanDijk: Bridging the Gap Between Otak’s International and Domestic Work
September, 2021
Being a trusted advisor means carefully listening to what clients and their beneficiaries truly want from a project and finding the right people to make it happen. Building those relationships can often result in identifying new design and function ideas that had not first been envisioned but enhance the desired outcomes. Otak has this type of advisor in Niels VanDijk, Vice President-in-Charge of Otak’s international business.
Niels brings three decades of experience leading projects in Asia and the United Arab Emirates and providing consulting support to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA). With his track record, he is the ideal person to take charge of Otak’s international business, and he relishes the work he does.
Niels is charged with pursuing business opportunities, maintaining client relations, and overseeing project implementation. “The function involves a lot of communication with clients, project staff, and stakeholders. It requires a high level of flexibility, patience, and the ability to come up with creative solutions,” he comments.
As a keen traveler, Niels enjoys that his role has him spending time on-site in a variety of countries either for business development or project implementation. He says constantly meeting interesting people and being challenged to find culturally appropriate solutions for urban development make his job enjoyable and interesting. What he finds abroad, he shares readily with Otak’s teams stateside, allowing us and our clients to benefit from his experiences. “I find it extremely rewarding to engage others at Otak in our international work. There is so much knowledge and expertise that we can apply in transforming communities in other environments than our own,” he states.
His skills were put into action on a recent assignment in Uzbekistan where he helped the government develop a national action plan for managing urbanization. In the same country, he is now leading a team of individual consultants to prepare a $100 million urban development loan for infrastructure investments across four cities. Niels also worked as project director on two urban development planning assignments for the Asian Development Bank (ADB), one in Nepal and the other in Palau. He ensured that the approach his team leaders and s
pecialists took aligned with the client and stakeholder expectations, overseeing quality control of all the deliverables. While he usually does this work on-site, the pandemic changed the typical approach, forcing the team to keep projects going, engage stakeholders, and conduct training and workshops remotely. Despite the obstacles of distance, they kept the projects moving ahead.
Niels fosters a collaborative environment when he leads projects ensuring clients benefit from the skills of everyone on the team. The added bonus is he brings a background founded in worldwide experiences, so no matter where he is working, he can easily build relationships that enable him to truly understand what his clients need and want and match the people who will make it all happen.