Shell Malaysia Exploration and Production (SMEP)

‘Shell to continue grooming more local talents’
by Cindy Lai, reporters@theborneopost.com. Posted on April 22, 2014, Tuesday

MIRI: Shell Malaysia Exploration and Production (SMEP) has been offering training programmes since the 1970s to groom more local talents to cope with increasing job demands.

Its manager (Learning and Development) Mak Met told reporters during a briefing session at Shell training centre here yesterday that job scope had evolved significantly over the years.

“Since the early days, when OT (operation technician) works as a single discipline to today’s more demanding job scope, our training programmes have continuously been analysed and amended to meet demands in the field.

“During the 18 to 24 months programme, technicians are trained under pressure in order to be competent and multi-skilled to handle the job.”

The difference between multi-disciplines and single ones, he explained, was that certain disciplines or workers with specific skill had the tendency to become overwhelmed with heavy workloads.

“But multi-disciplines or multi-skilled workers tend to remove the demarcation, encourage and improve teamwork that could contribute to high work efficiency and better capability for the company.”

Upon graduation, these technicians would be deployed at oil and gas production facilities.

Under the Operation Technician Training Programme, technicians would undergo training at Shell training centre with machinery that is similar to that of real ones in the offshore platform.

“Training on the job are crucially important for them to apply whatever they have learnt,” said Met, adding that the technicians would also assessed and obtained external certification of auditors – BTEC and Edexcel from United Kingdom.

The intake opportunity for operation technicians are open to diploma holders who are fresh graduate from technical colleges and university in disciplines such as mechanical, electrical, instrument and process.

“Our OT recruitment is very diverse in terms of the people, as from the graduates we could see there are those from Sarawak and Sabah. Even though graduates from local technical institutions stand the highest percentage, those from foreign and local universities in Sarawak and Peninsular Malaysia are also taken in consideration.

“Nonetheless, there are certainly no differences amongst the races.”

Meanwhile, the Leader of Teams (LoT) development programme, which is usually offered to existing employees, is a 24-month programme conducted worldwide to develop leaders or supervisors.

“After recruiting employees, it is essential to groom the potential candidate to lead the rest,” he said adding that business leaders would the programme.

The programme, he said, was developed based on four Shell leadership attributes namely, authenticity, growth, collaboration and performance (ACGP).

After the briefing, media members were brought on a short tour around the training plant and were briefed by the graduate technicians.