For decades, the university education has provided a base foundation and prepared students to join the workforce. Despite the technical foundation, students lack practical exposure. To bridge the practical knowledge gap, the industry has launched various short duration interns/externs programs. Even then these programs are not broad enough to provide a holistic understanding of the Oil and Gas Industry. Therefore, in 2015 to address this practical application NExT, a Schlumberger company, launched an interactive simulation based learning competition called PetroChallenge sponsored by Oil and Gas companies. The students are grouped into integrated teams of 3 or 4 participants; for example, an engineer, geoscientist and a business major student forms a team. Each team then acts as an operating company being fully exposed to the complete upstream cycle of the oil and gas industry using a web-based simulator called OilSim. Throughout the event, these teams make Exploration and Production (E&P) decisions and their actions and choices are then judged through the Net Present Value (NPV) of their company. The winning teams are declared based on the combined highest NPV and credibility points, earned by each team based on their challenge decisions and corporate social activities and engagements. As E&P companies are making a stride to reduce the "Time to Autonomy" for new recruits, an event like the PetroChallenge can be a good enabler for students to be better prepared when joining the workforce. In these unique events, the sponsoring companies have an opportunity to evaluate potential recruits in action, not only from a technical perspective, but also, their business acumen including negotiation, risk taking and decision making skills. In the same token, students get an opportunity to network with their potential employers. In 2015, three Universities (Rice, Penn State and University of Toronto) and ShawCor partnered with NExT and launched the inaugural PetroChallenge. These three events marked a phenomenal impact in students' learning and understanding of the oil and gas decision making process. Two winning teams from each of these events met at the North America finals, with Penn State becoming the first North American PetroChallenge university champions. This presentation is prepared to share the key learnings and benefits of this type of student engagement prior to them moving into the real world.
Access to talent is a growing concern for most E&P companies as the industry focuses on new resource plays, new frontiers, and the adoption of new technologies. The average experience of engineers and geoscientists is decreasing. Consequently, E&P companies are re-assessing the strategic importance of talent development programs to transfer knowledge from experts to recent hires. Current technical talent development models focus on accelerating the development and transferring the domain knowledge, but they often exclude technology proficiency and technology-driven workflows to the developmental detriment of the newly hired engineers or geoscientists. Technology proficiency is essential for finding business solutions in today's data-driven E&P environment. Using case studies, we compared and contrasted the two different approaches used to develop effectiveness and efficiency of the future petrotechnical experts (PTEs). To develop the effectiveness of PTEs, it is essential to assess their domain knowledge and identify gaps with respect to the capabilities required to execute a company's strategy. In contrast, to develop the efficiency of these PTEs, it is necessary to assess the current technical workflows and the proficiency of the PTEs in using the company's chosen technologies. Four key aspects of training were reviewed: company structure, employee domain knowledge, employed technology, and operational workflows. The assessment results highlight and validate issues that collectively impact the development of PTEs' technology proficiency and productivity. This holistic evaluation approach ensured that the talent management recommendations were aligned with a company's strategy. Also, this approach highlighted the need for synergy between the human resource department and the senior technical community of the company. The assessment quantified the efficacy of existing talent development programs. Using the established capability and technology consumption gaps, the company was able to focus the investments made in sourcing and/or creating talent development programs.
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