Aligned Business, Talent Strategies Needed for Success in Mexico

Workforce planning is essential for determining long and short-term needs. However, the real challenge begins once companies have hired their workforce: keeping those workers.

“What we have found is that, at five year mark, oil and gas companies have trouble keeping people,” said Tenenbaum. “They spend money on training and then at five years they have a huge turnover.”

One example of this trend is petroleum engineers. Tenenbaum said that oil and gas companies spend a quarter of a million to train a petroleum engineer during their first five years of employment; they essentially end up training petroleum engineers for their next employer.

Survey Results Highlight Worker, Skills Shortages

Over the next five years, oil and gas companies expect to see shortages of petroleum engineers, plant/operations engineers, upstream project managers for large-scale projects, plant/operations managers and plant/operations technicians, according to Mercer’s February 2014 Global Oil and Gas Workforce Practices Survey. The survey, which opened in early 2013 and is still open for comment, includes feedback from more than 150 global oil and gas companies and over one million workers worldwide.

The industry faces challenges not only in the number of people as many older workers retire, but skill sets, which can take years to develop in workers such as petroleum engineers for downstream technicians. These issues are pervasive throughout the upstream, midstream and downstream sectors.

Given the global challenges that the oil and gas industry, the industry needs to create a new mindset for how to recruit and manage talent. Every leader within in a company also needs to be accountable for talent management, said John Koob, partner with Mercer.

In terms of skills, Mercer found in the survey that project management skills, supervisory/management skills, leadership skills, technical skills/knowledge, and communications skills were the top five skill gaps in the existing workforce. To attract, retain and engage workers, companies looking to enter Mexico not only need to invest in their workers technical abilities, but soft skills, such as leadership, supervisory and communications skills, Koob noted.


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