Skilled people are the challenge

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Nabil Alalawi’s company is developing people to meet the growth in demand for its services.

Getting the right people is the greatest challenge facing the services sector of the oil industry, according to Nabil Alalawi, managing director of oilfield services company Almansoori.

The current oil boom is the culprit. Demand for oil field services, essentially a people business, is high due to sturdy oil prices. Companies such as Almansoori are finding people capable of providing the quality clients demand hard to track down.

"People are now looking to get every drop of oil they can from fields that were uneconomical in the past, and they want to do it as fast as possible," said Alalawi.

To achieve this operators need more of the right people working their assets. Add to this the high daily rates for drilling rigs and it leaves service companies having to do more, while working with greater speed and precision. The cost of failure can be measured in thousands of dollars an hour.

"I may have ten times more work," said Alalawi. "But the question is, do I have ten times more people? Our challenge is to grow qualified, professionally trained people as fast as the industry is growing.

"We had felt the traditional way was best. We would take a fresh graduate, put him in the field and he would tag along and learn the hard way, slowly developing skills. This takes a long time, but you get good solid experience. Today that is not on; it's just too slow."

Almansoori thinks an accelerated training programme is the answer. It set one up using its sister company, the Gulf Technical and Safety Training Centre. Using a combination of classroom training and practice on sites, such as disused wells, the programme has produced results in half the time of field training. However, Almansoori has found the approach doesn't instill a solid base of self-confidence in trainees. Subsequently it has introduced more supervisors, to help build the practical confidence of those new to working in the field.

With much of the company's new work emerging from North Africa -specifically Egypt, Libya and Algeria -Almansoori is also getting the chance to put its policy of using a local workforce, where possible, into practice. This is proving easier in some countries than in others.

"Egypt is the number one HR factory for the whole of the Middle East. It has plenty of big universities, able to produce hundreds of qualified engineers, who speak Arabic and English," said Alalawi.

Alalawi describes the situation in Libya as more difficult. He says years of sustained sanctions have led to a population that does not have the qualified background the company needs. But things can change.

"In a country like Libya we can start from scratch and have a work force that is 80% local in four to five years," said Alalawi.

The company has found the best method for achieving this kind of localisation is to train people outside their home country.

"We don't want to train them in their normal environment. If we train them here [in the UAE] they care more," he said. "It's more costly, but it's also more effective."

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