Education and Training for the Oil and Gas Industry: Building a Technically Competent Workforce 2 [antikvár]

Preface Welcome to the Getenergy Guides Series. In this volume, we focus on the challenge of building a technically competent workforce. After finding commercial quantities of hydrocarbons in a 'friendly' country, this could be considered as the most important challenge facing oil and gas companies everywhere. The technical competency of employees lies at the heart of the productivity and safety of every company working in the industry. What is more, the need to develop technically competent workers transcends the oil and gas industry. The degree to which nations remain 'friendly' to the international oil and gas business depends, in part, on how effectively the resource windfall transforms into sustainable economic and employment growth and diversification across the economy. We believe such growth and diversification comes down to the strength of a country's education and training system and its ability to evolve and grow. However, like any commercially and politically important concept, building a technically competent workforce comes with semantic difficulties, which are best dealt with at the start of this volume, rather than this becoming an unwanted distraction to the reader as the stories we tell unfold. With this in mind, we have decided to explore the concepts to which the title of this volume refers up front. FIRST WORD - BUILDING This implies that there is not already something to begin with. Or if there is, it is a set of components awaiting assembly. This is obviously not the case for many of those nations who have been exploiting natural resources for years. However, it is true that nascent energy nations view the industry as a vital lever that can help the transition from an agricultural to an industrial and then, perhaps, a post-industrial 'knowledge' economy. This aspiration is not a remote goal of developing nations but in fact rather mirrors the story of the cities of Aberdeen and Houston, the latter of which features as a case study in this volume. Building the workforce is demonstrably a key component of that development. And as the Houston case demonstrates, rebuilding is often necessary. In using 'Building' not only are we referencing workforce development underpinned by education and training, but we also want to accentuate the positive opportunity that exists here, (something we originally set out in the Preface of the first Getenergy Guide where we explored the concept of 'Energy, Education and Economy'); namely that whatever the workforce might look like today,