Hajar El Haddaoui and the work of opening doors

Moving abroad can reset a career. Experience remains, but the language, professional networks and rules of recognition change. Hajar El Haddaoui has described that experience from the inside.

In an interview published by Swisscom in 2020, she recalled moving from Montreal to Zurich a decade earlier. Without German, finding the right opportunity proved difficult. She accepted a professional step backwards to start again in sales and service. By the time of the interview, she was heading the company’s western region.

That beginning gives substance to the leadership roles that followed. It also makes her story recognisable to readers across the Moroccan diaspora. International careers frequently involve periods when an established professional must become a newcomer again.

The important part is what happens next: learning, adjusting and finding a route towards greater responsibility.

A Moroccan background, an international perspective

El Haddaoui is of Moroccan origin, the daughter of a diplomat and a teacher. Her biography for The A Effect describes a multicultural upbringing and a subsequent base in Switzerland.

Such a background helps explain the importance she places on understanding others. Working across cultures requires more than speaking a common language. People may interpret authority, initiative or disagreement differently. A manager has to make those differences workable.

For professionals who have built a life abroad, that ability often develops through necessity. It can later become a valuable organisational skill: recognising uncertainty, explaining expectations and helping colleagues find their footing.

Building credibility through business

Her career includes Bell Canada, Swisscom and a move to NTT in Switzerland in 2022. NTT’s own announcement welcomed her knowledge of the Swiss technology market and her focus on customer value.

This commercial foundation matters. Digital transformation is often discussed through systems and emerging technologies, yet organisations also need people who can connect a technical offer with an actual requirement.

Customers need to understand what a service will change. Teams need workable objectives. Managers must identify where adoption is failing and why. Experience at that interface brings a practical discipline to discussions that can otherwise remain abstract.

El Haddaoui’s career can be read through that connecting role: between technology and customers, strategy and operations, then business and institutional cooperation.

Making advancement available to others

Her public discussions of leadership also address women’s access to responsibility. In her Swiss Leaders interview, she highlights talent development and the conditions that help women progress.

The subject carries a personal dimension. Speaking to The A Effect, she recalled a recruitment conversation in which her name was treated as a potential problem in dealings with clients. In the same interview, she described ambition as something that should help others advance alongside her.

These experiences offer a grounded way to discuss inclusion. Recruitment decisions, access to mentors and opportunities to take responsibility shape who becomes visible inside an organisation.

For younger Moroccan professionals abroad, her trajectory provides a useful reference. It shows that adjustment can coexist with ambition, and that a difficult beginning need not determine the scale of a career.

Taking the conversation beyond the company

By June 2025, the International Labour Organization identified El Haddaoui as Director General of the Digital Cooperation Organization. The occasion was an agreement addressing digital skills, inclusion and the changing world of work.

This brings a different set of responsibilities into view. A company considers how technology can improve its activity. International institutions must also ask who can participate, which skills people need and how economic opportunities can be shared more widely.

Those questions are especially relevant to countries seeking to develop their own digital capabilities. Training matters, but so does the ability to turn knowledge into services, businesses and employment.

El Haddaoui’s documented contact with Morocco includes a meeting during GITEX Africa in April 2025, reported by the country’s Ministry of Digital Transition. It provides evidence of an institutional connection with the Kingdom without establishing responsibility for any specific national programme.

Her current professional position

Swiss Leaders currently lists El Haddaoui on its national committee. Her October 2026 Experia biography states that she leads global digital transformation at Stadler AG and refers to her DCO Director General position as a former role. The Stadler information is attributed to the event organiser; direct company confirmation was not found in the sources reviewed.

The broader significance of her career lies in the capabilities it brings together: international experience, organisational leadership and an understanding of how people respond to change.

For Morocco, such profiles widen the discussion about its overseas talent. A contribution may involve investment, but it may also take the form of mentoring, professional connections or the sharing of management experience.

For an individual reader, the message is more immediate. A career can survive a reset. New skills can reopen possibilities. And reaching a position of responsibility creates an opportunity to make the route more accessible to those who follow.