Collaborating to Build A World-Class Workforce Competence For East African Oil and Gas
The key shortage in East African oil and gas is one of the qualified personnel with skills and expertise to deliver productivity and high performance needed.
Even as oil prices began to recover in 2017 and 2018, the oil and gas industry remained focused and now place a huge premium on productivity, innovation and high performance of the workforce. And that is expected to continue in 2020 and beyond.
From the first day, I entered the oil and gas industry, I have been told that the industry need competency. It is an industry in which operational safety, productivity and high performance are paramount.
What happens if you don’t be able to hire skills quickly enough or insufficient volume to deliver the innovation, productivity and high performance required.
The answer is pretty simple. You are going to delay production. You are going to increase overall operational costs. And the whole East African oil and gas industry will become less profitable in the long run.
Research indicates that, the oil and gas industry is adopting new technology. But software competence and ability to use up-to-date technology are not readily available with graduates and young professionals. And need to be urgently trained and developed for the benefit of businesses communities and countries.
This article is set out to answer a number of key questions about a new revolutionary approach to address a skills shortage primarily in Tanzania and regionally in East Africa.
How employers in the oil and gas industry, education providers work together more collaboratively to raise performance standards of work competence of the Tanzania’s oil and gas sector and propel it to become world-class, internationally competitive and prosper for the benefit of all stakeholders?
How to prepare our graduates who are facing rapidly changing job market characterized by advanced technology to become internally competitive?
What are the best collaboration strategies between regional universities with oil and gas curriculum and their foreign counterpart to create world class graduates versus local champion?
Answers to these questions are essential for employers, colleges with oil and gas curriculum, private training providers policymakers, and other stakeholders to make a revolution in training and development of local capacity and move them from just local champion to world class levels.
Dr. Mohamed Mahgoub, the Geophysics Expert in the Gulf Countries from his point of view and his wide experience in oil and gas since 1990 says “Challenges and opportunities in Tanzania shall be addressed through developing local resources, capacities and finding collaborative solutions and prepare Tanzanian and East African students to be world-class graduates with upgrading their syllabus through partnership with international high ranking universities and training and developing the African young professionals and move them to professional Specialists and Subject Matter Experts.”
A road Map For Performance Improvement In The Oil and Gas Industry
Here are two collaboration strategies to strengthen work competence of the East African oil and gas sector:
- Creating Formal Partnership Between Colleges and Employers In The Oil and Gas Industry
To address the skills shortage, East African Universities and colleges should collaborate and work jointly with employers in the oil and gas industry to develop curriculum, or provide materials and equipment for students to engage in hands-on experiential learning. A partnership between colleges and oil and gas employers in the development and upgrading of curriculum will ensure they programs offered at colleges are aligned with the oil and gas industry needs and will result in performance improvement in the workplace. For example, oil and gas service providers donate free software for seismic data processing as the CGG Seismic service provider has established seismic processing unit with Geovation processing software for Sultan Qaboos University in Oman and other universities in Africa and different areas of
- Collaboration with internationally higher-ranking universities in this oil and gas related curriculum
A consortium between University and Industry and world specialist organization in Education institutes or universities to standardize the oil and gas students Curriculum for4/5 year program. Universities; especially for oil and gas should have a close collaborative consortium with internationally higher ranking universities in this oil and gas related curriculum which having the state-of-the-art technologies and related sciences. Partnership with those super major universities is fundamentally needed to help with significant improvement in the education system and producing world class graduates who are internationally competitive
Final Words
Collaboration is key to aligned training and development with industry needs. Furthermore is the way to move the industry professionals from just users and followers to expat experts to professional independent focal point. That resulting in producing local leaders of the oil and gas industry and they will able to leading the industrialization phases execution accordingly.
