oa Partnering to develop a national workforce: Practical challenges and solution

The challenges facing the Middle East region include increasing the oil production capacity and ageing of the production facilities. To meet these challenges we must have a national workforce capable of achieving these goals. The creation and subsequent development of this national workforce is not an easy task. This presentation concentrates on the practical challenges that face all national oil companies in the region and how to overcome them so as to develop the required local force that can deal with the industry’s technical challenges. The presenter has trained more than 2,500 geoscientists and engineers from the entire region since 2004.The analysis of these short and long-term training sessions has led to the identification of some barriers to build this national workforce; for example: English language skills, sequential courses without on-job-training, early jump toward software-learning before walking through the technical basics, the wrong person in the wrong course, course contents, unqualified instructors, student’s aptitude and attitude and non-technical culture. The solutions to these obstacles include updating the course contents, using local examples, improving the work ethic of local employees, training them on character and not only technical skills, involving supervisors more with participants, using domestic experts as teachers, increasing the cooperation between academia and operating companies, and making sure the right attendee is in the correct course. The Middle East contains 67% of the proven<br>world oil reserves. It has a talented and young generation and owns the technology to make it happen. What we need to do is to walk the talk.