It might not have been immediately apparent among the imposing stands and impressive displays and equipment that packed the halls of the Exhibition Centre, but if you paused to read the corporate messages and banners on which companies tried to sum up what was important to them, you found a continuous emphasis on their investment in their people and in delivering to clients the expertise, skills, and commitment that their teams could offer. Almost every company was seeking to get the message across that it was their people’s technical and business skills that were the key to their appeal and their success in markets across the world.

This is not new. (How often have you heard companies proclaim ‘our people are our main resource?’), but there did seem to be a new urgency about it this time. Some companies had put their money where their mouths are and stuck to training, development, and recruitment during the credit crunch, others had taken the big risk of not doing so. The outcome will be telling.

The SPE and Reed, the conference organisers, responded to this trend by involving Getenergy, the company that specialises in bringing the oil and gas industry together with the suppliers and providers of education, training, and learning (universities, colleges, training companies and consultancies). Getenergy’s organised a ‘village’ version at Offshore Europe of the global, regional, and national events it delivers.

Getenergy’s programme involved exchanges and public sessions which addressed the industry’s relationships with those who supply it with education and learning. There were interviews with chief executives about their own personal careers and the role they saw for learning in their companies, sessions led by universities with close relationships with the industry, case studies on how to engage education in business development, and exchanges with engineers and managers from the industry on how their professional development and the way their companies support their learning objectives enable them to perform at the industry’s leading edge. Other sessions offered models of leadership education and discussed the ways in which the oil and gas industry can work with education and training for success in specific markets.

There were some important insights at these sessions and in the informal meetings they provoked across the exhibition. Among them:

• That the industry can’t move forward without a bond with higher education. Companies that that both invest in and exploit relations with universities for recruitment, professional development and research will step ahead in an increasingly complex and demanding technical and commercial environment

• That the industry shouldn’t just rely on a few tried and trusted university partners, but look for fresh relationships both at home and in overseas markets. Education and training changes just as rapidly as science, engineering, and the other commercial components of everyone’s business plan

• That the world of education should do more about integrating ‘soft’ skills into its curricula. They should concentrate on producing people who do not need so much retraining when they join the industry. They should also realise that what the industry is increasingly demanding the very best people with the capacity to work with, and lead, multi-disciplinary teams.

• The industry should be more open to student attachments and temporary jobs. Engineering and science students are today more likely to spend their vacations stacking shelves at Tesco’s than working in the industry: they need the money and the industry isn’t responding

• That immense impact can achieved by engaging with education in overseas markets. Not only can companies meet national employment requirements more effectively, but they can support international education partnerships which will raise standards locally, and come up with technology transfer solutions that will be business winners with national oil companies.

• That the oil and gas industry is as much a ‘knowledge’ industry as the worlds of finance, IT, and telecoms, and that the opposite of knowledge is ignorance.

These and other issues that arose during Getenergy’s sessions are not necessarily new, but at Offshore Europe they were given a new urgency and a fresh approach because of the direction in which the industry itself is developing, with more challenging technical demands and a constant need for companies to seek the high ground in offering new scientific and engineering solutions across the world. Getenergy’s own dedicated events (for Iraq in Istanbul in October, the Gulf States in Bahrain in November, and for Libya in Tripoli in December) will get into more detail on how these markets work and how both the oil and gas companies and the education and training suppliers should be working together to gain advantage.

The overall message was ‘keep learning: there is no alternative!’

Peter Mackenzie Smith
Chairman
Getenergy

Global Education and Training for Energy