UK Energy Institute Publishes Report on Industry Skills Resource Issues

The Energy Institute (EI) has announced the publication of a report that calls for future skills shortages and leadership development needs in the energy sector to be treated as strategic boardroom issues.

This was one of the key recommendations drawn from surveys conducted by the EI in partnership with Deloitte, the leading management consultancy, and Norman Broadbent, an organisation dedicated to the search for executive talent in the energy sector, between 2005 and 2007.

A summary of the “Skills needs in the energy industry” report was presented during I P Week in London last week.

For some years, the sector has registered a steady decline in the number of new recruits, especially those with science, engineering and technical (SET) skills, whilst a large section of the workforce is rapidly approaching retirement.

The EI, Deloitte and Norman Broadbent set out to examine the scale of the problem and surveyed both energy companies and individual employees to gauge how this could affect the industry and more importantly identify a way forward in responding to the challenge.

The surveys confirmed that, with 50% of the respondents expecting to leave the industry within the next decade - mostly through retirement - and the main skills shortage being for technical specialists, particularly engineers, the industry faces a serious challenge in attracting a new generation of people to deliver the energy policies and targets set out by governments.

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Editors Note
While the above report refers to the British market, it is a international industry wide open in all parts of the oil and gas chain. It is our experience in the distribution and retail marketing sector that "outsourcing" is also having a huge long term affect on the loss of skills and knowledge built up over years.