Competency is the ability to apply knowledge and skills to perform a specific task effectively and consistently within time frame and demonstrated by relevant behavior. Levels of competencies with knowledge and skills defined separately have been identified under different job families in Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) like Geoscience, Petroleum, Reservoir and Drilling Engineering. These competency levels can be equated with 4 internationally recognized levels of competencies i.e. Awareness, Basic Application, Skilled Application and Mastery. The desire towards international standards of performance and increasing nationalization of technical manpower has caused a major shift in how the oil and gas industry trains and develops its workforce. Like Kuwait Oil Company, many companies are facing problems due to bimodal age distribution of their technical manpower i.e. a sizeable group of experienced personnel are close to their retirement age and a large pool of young professionals and new hires are joining the oil and gas sector with no or very little practical exposure. As a result there is a significant shortage of fully qualified, mid-level technical workforce to bridge this generation gap. Therefore, the need of the hour is a fast track development of these new hires to equip them with sufficient knowledge and skills in a shortest possible time. In view of above objective, a competency based new hire's roadmap has been designed by KOC. The present paper has come out with an approach which is being implemented successfully to develop new hires on fast track basis. It involves four stages namely Familiarization, Customized Workshops (Discipline wise), Mandatory Foundation Assignments (MFA) and Career Path Oriented Project. After completion of the New Hires Roadmap, a technical employee may attain the competency level where He or She can perform routine tasks and related assignments independently.
The desire towards international standards of performance and increasing nationalization of technical manpower has caused a major shift in how the oil and gas industry trains and develops its workforce. Like Kuwait Oil Company (KOC), many companies are facing problem due to bimodal age distribution of their technical manpower i.e. a sizeable group of experienced personnel nearing retirement and a large pool of younger, new or recent hires, but a shortage of fully qualified, mid-level technical workforce. Present paper deals with Mandatory Foundation Assignment (MFA) which is a unique out of box idea of recent times to train fresh graduates in a shortest time period. An excellent planning like identification of real ongoing projects, rotations, site visits, periodical assessments including assessments in the final presentations and involvement of Training Coordinators, Mentors and Coaches are some of the factors which made this a grand success in KOC. The uniqueness of the MFA is to expose fresh graduates to real ongoing projects under the guidance of a Coach with added E learning courses to understand the overall objective of a Geoscientist or Engineers working in Exploration or Field Development with no extra cost to company.Emphasis has been given to the sub-surface technical manpower, the processes of MFA and different elements involved in the success of the program. The MFA is a part of roadmap which has established a framework of fresh graduate's development system in a rotational format of 4 months each. This is a practical approach to train new hires in real work environments at an accelerated pace whereby they contribute to completing on-going projects. The MFA provides a solid work foundation and necessary knowledge and skills to become independent operational employees able to carry out basic routine tasks with minimum guidance after completion of the program.The success of the program is evident in KOC as seven cycles of MFA has been completed with around 70 recent hires have become not only operational but also developed confidence to deliver their work and new findings in technical presentations in International Conferences.
There are many learning tools available to fill competency gaps of an employee. The common learning tools are classroom courses, workshops, internal on job Training, external on job training with international companies, NOCs and Service Companies, e learning and other learning activities like attending conferences, forums, symposiums etc. However, the most cost effective tool is E-learning. This helps to fill the technical knowledge gap of the participant with flexibility and conveniently. Most of the E-Learning topics include multimedia for better deliverability. It is the most popular learning tool among new generation because they are technology oriented. The present paper focusses on a pilot project where an attempt has been made to strengthen the E-learning tool through Action learning. The pilot project needed involvement of Coaches and Discipline Experts (DEs) besides candidates selected as participants of E-learning. Accordingly, as a case study, 10 employees (batch of same job family) with same topic were chosen to participate in the pilot project. Few discipline experts and coaches were also involved related to the course content of the E-learning session. A half-day session was organized with online access of the E-learning topic to all participants and DEs and coaches. After going through the entire topic, a group discussion was held and followed by question answer (QA) session. As E-learning is a kind of self-learning; the effectiveness of the learning tool was dependent on the seriousness of an individual employee. Conventional assignment of E-learning topic and its implementation was helpful in filling the competency gap in the order of 60 to 70% of the course contents or even lower. However, after making E-Learning in to Action Learning through pilot project, the competency gap filling has been achieved up to 100%. The implementation of E-learning through Action Learning has developed an interest, value addition and fulfillment of competency gaps of individual employees. This will result in fast track development of technical competence and thus help to achieve the group's business needs and company's goal.
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