Overcoming Virtual Training Challenges to Promote the Adoption of Cloud Solutions

Abstract

Cloud solutions play an essential role in digital transformation in the oil and gas industry. Training is key to promote cloud solutions and accelerate digital transformation. Unlike legacy computer-based software, agile development, which continuously releases new features of cloud solutions, makes the learning process more challenging because of the necessarily fast-paced adoption of the knowledge. Another challenge was that we had to virtually deliver the training sessions because of the pandemic during 2020 and 2021, which made the interaction with students very difficult without face-to-face contact. To be ready for the virtual training challenges, a self-guided quick-learning page was created and leveraged to bridge the gap between the continuous release of new features in cloud solutions and the fast-paced knowledge adoption. Training materials, including the self-training page, were updated once every quarter to reflect the new features in the cloud solutions. Unlike traditional software, after each training, the web-based training environment (tenant) was occupied by many training projects created by students, which made it difficult to be used by the new group of students. To solve this issue, a new procedure was developed to efficiently reset the tenant to ensure a smooth and data-secured training. As the training requests grew exponentially, more than 35 training tenants were created to meet the high demand and frequency of training from different customers across the world. The self-guided quick-training page has more than 17,454 visits and 600 unique users, with positive feedback from students. In 2021, more than 630 users from 40 countries were successfully trained. This is a two-fold increase from 2020 and a five-fold increase from 2019. In this paper, we provide new insight to successfully deliver virtual training and promote the adoption of cloud solutions in the digital transformation of the exploration and production industry.