How strong is your presence in the Middle East’s oil and gas industry?
As the focal point for skills, training and workforce competency in oil and gas around the world, OPITO has a strong presence in many international energy hubs, but particularly in the Middle East, where we have been active since 2005, both from our office in Dubai and in Abu Dhabi, which has provided a home to the OPITO Safety & Competency Conference – the only global event focussed on safety and competency in the oil and gas industry – for six years, following its inception in 2010.
We work with governments and oil and gas industry employers around the globe to develop and implement national and international competency frameworks. These frameworks are supported by the combination of skills expertise and industry-led standards, and our standards are being rolled out by the major employers throughout the Middle East. Indeed, tens of thousands of workers in the region are trained to OPITO standards every year.
We are also working closely with industry and regional governments to develop a safer workforce through positive changes in behaviour via our standards framework. Overall, OPITO is the number one choice for the Middle East.
What skills and safety training do you deliver in this region and globally?
From travelling safely to work by boat, truck or helicopter, to managing major emergencies and deploying specialist firefighting and emergency teams to react to the situation as it escalates, the spectrum of OPITO standards is both broad and all-encompassing within the workforce and workplace. They also incorporate the technical skills and training associated with hazardous activities, as safety is never in isolation and a skilled worker is a safer worker.
The OPITO standards cover a range of disciplines and job roles, such as processing hydrocarbons, electrical, mechanical maintenance, working in an H2S environment, gas testing, rigging and lifting, banksman, slinging and crane operations.
This is not ‘a bit of training’, however. All the standards and their contents are interrelated and connected within an industry-designed, complex framework. It is this comprehensive framework that helps make OPITO standards the global standard of choice in the oil and gas industry.
What types of training are in demand given the current state of the market?
There are two priorities: the first is building a foundation of safety and survival training using OPITO standards such as the Basic Offshore Safety Induction and Emergency Training (BOSIET) and International Minimum Industry Safety Training (IMIST). This foundation is critical to then develop workforce skills into specialist emergency response areas that exist within the OPITO framework. The second is around the important role technical standards and qualifications have in the development of the indigenous workforce. Using globally recognised industry standards makes a long-term, positive contribution to the Middle East workforce nationalisation programmes. Too often nationalisation of local employees is spoken about with little real or meaningful action taken to deliver positive results.
OPITO qualifications ensure the local population get the workplace opportunities they deserve and not those reserved just for expatriates. Without skilling, the local workforce in the Middle East will never remove the perennial problem of matching workforce supply and demand, which leads to issues such as an imbalance in the workforce, with too few nationals getting the opportunities they deserve, in addition to the detrimental cost inflation it brings to the industry.
With both NOCs and IOCs in the region having to reduce their workforces, is there enough demand for your services?
The hazards and risks surrounding our industry remain the same regardless of the oil price. Looking back to the number of incidents and accidents recorded around the previous lows of 1986 and 1999, the figures show a clear correlation between poor safety performance and a global downturn.
Throughout the current downturn, we have urged companies to implement robust strategies that look at the long-term needs of the workforce and avoid seeking to gain a measure of fiscal balance by cutting their investment in safety and skills development.
While the numbers going through training have fallen, in line with the jobs that have been lost in the global workforce, we are not seeing any reduction in the industry’s commitment to invest in workforce safety.
Instead, we are seeing more demand than ever for people to be trained to globally recognised standards, with a record-breaking 108 new additions to the courses delivered by our network of approved training providers forecast by the end of this year, more than double the number originally projected.
Does the Middle East’s energy sector suffer from a shortage of skilled labour?
The Middle East is still relatively buoyant compared to other regions. With a huge amount of the world’s oil and gas located in the Middle East, the region is expected to continue being one of the primary suppliers of energy well into the future.
While reserves are plentiful, instability in the region has limited growth, most notably in Iraq and Syria, and skills are a particular issue in the Middle East, where a lack of domestic talent means that the region’s oil and gas workforce continues to be dominated by expatriates.
Engineering organisations have estimated that as many as 50% of skilled workers in the sector may retire in the next five to seven years, while a lack of science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates means that an insufficient level of talent is entering the industry at the other end.
In addition to this, while career prospects for women in the industry have improved in recent years and an increasing number are taking advantage of those opportunities, there is still a lot of progress to be made.
As oil and gas companies in the region prioritise cost-efficiency, do you feel HSE standards are being compromised?
There is no place for compromise when it comes to safety in the oil and gas industry, whatever the oil price. While we have historically seen a rise in the number of incidents around the time of previous downturns, the industry today has a standards-based approach to training and competency that simply didn’t exist before.
Delivered by approved training providers across the globe, it ensures personnel receive quality-assured training so they are competent to carry out their roles safely. So, while for many months we have seen the industry adjusting to the low oil price environment – and there will likely continue to be bad news for many in the months ahead, with regards to workforce cuts – what we aren’t seeing is standards going out the window in favour of cost-based training. Instead, the message we are hearing is that these standards are critical and the industry wants them.
Do you feel the regional energy sector is investing enough in HSSE as well as on skills and training?
We see clear commitment to using OPITO standards across the region, which tells me HSSE continues to be a priority. More could absolutely be achieved, however. Sadly, there is some evidence that the industry is still taking a short-term view of workforce skills development during this downturn. I know it can be difficult to look five years ahead and invest accordingly but, if we don’t, at some stage in the future a significant skills gap will emerge, costs will increase dramatically and local populations won’t be in a position to compete for jobs.
