Mandatory Foundation Assignment - A Fast Track Approach to Fill Competency Gaps

Abstract

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.