The industry must be courageous enough to invest in its skills pipeline amidst a dipped marketplace, according to Atlas chairman Robert Morgan.
The company leader said the North Sea sector must arm itself with “the confidence to push on and do the right thing” for both its people and businesses.
He said: “Competency and the skills for the workforce will come back very quickly so they need to continue to plan to do that and maybe have a different way of engaging with people. We need to think beyond just the short term.
“If the oil price did come back to $100 a barrel would the practices around sharing, collaboration and using cost better would they actually have been addressed in that time? Or would they just be back to what we were doing four or five months ago?”
Unlike some of its international counterparts, the North Sea has a proven track record of rallying to produce industry wide momentum, according to the company leader.
Morgan pinpointed the development of the safety training MIST as a North Sea success.
He added: “America tends to follow behind. It’s almost a different approach. It’s an approach where some of the techniques people use are probably 10, 15, 20 years old in some parts. There’s a real suspicious nature around why people would share in collaboration, which is part of the new way of learning in this media-type age.
“That’s kind of strange and it’s probably the biggest employer – five or six times bigger than the North Sea. That’s the opportunity we’ve got to transfer our skills and adapt them for different cultures. We’ve have good experience of that doing that in Africa and the Middle East over the years.”
But there’s always room for improvement, according to the chairman.
“I think some of the apprenticeship models and the way that some of the oil companies engage with younger entrants needs to improve quite dramatically,” he said.
The Middle East is leading the way in cultivating the next generation of innovators by training four to fives times the apprentices each year regardless of oil price, according to the company leader.
He said: “It’s that sort of start stop thing – separating out the oil price to the long term requirements to the industry – that the industry needs to get better at explaining.”
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