Technology can help bridge the skills shortage in the chemical and process industries

Bridge the gap

03 February 2010 00:00  [Source: ICB]

In finding a solution to the skills shortage problem, see how technology can help companies in the chemical and other process industries

Consultant's corner
John Taylor/AspenTech

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ACROSS THE Western world in particular, process engineering companies have typically benefited from being able to access experienced talent in the form of operators, control/process engineers and general IT staff. Today, we are seeing the effects of a demographic time bomb. Thousands of engineers are on the verge of retirement and there is a shortage of staff with sufficient skills to replace these employees.

With pressure from the market and companies looking at rationalizing assets, this situation is likely to worsen - at least in the short term. Heightening the problem further is the fact that a prolonged recession is likely to accelerate the current trend among engineers to take early retirement.

The problem is particularly acute across the oil, gas and chemical sectors. According to international trade body the Society of Petroleum Engineers, the average age of a petroleum worker is 51. Nearly 60% are 45 or older. This represents a peak in the profile of existing workers and suggests that approximately 40% of the workforce will be lost over the next decade.

In many cases, pioneering veterans of the oil and gas industry with 20 years' experience and extensive knowledge of industry strategies and tricks of the trade are now facing retirement. These skills are often not being replaced. And these engineers are often substituted by lower-cost people with less experience.

It is not unusual today across the process industries for organizations to have up to one-third of their workforce with less than three years' experience. And many of these workers will not have the same technical grounding as their predecessors.

According to UK-based technology and consulting services firm Shell Global Solutions, US colleges produced fewer than 200,000 technically based graduates to replace the 2m experienced professionals who retired between 1998 and 2008.

And similar problems exist across the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Asia) region, where students are increasingly choosing to pursue business-focused, rather than technology-focused, degrees and careers.

HOW TECH CAN DRIVE A SOLUTION
Companies across the sector are already suffering from the effects of these problems. The prospect of such a far-reaching loss of industry knowledge requires urgent action.

Organizations need to wrestle with the problem of how to capture and retain organizational knowledge and pass it on effectively to the incoming generation with its completely different approach to absorbing information.

The business model will need to change if process engineering is to fulfill its potential to drive cost efficiencies in the oil and gas and chemical sectors. After all, the days where a veteran travels the world and takes total end-to-end ownership of a project can no longer deliver the requisite fast return on investment.

Technology needs to play catch-up and veteran expertise needs to be complemented with easier-to-use tools and processes, better integration of product sets, globalization of solutions and, most importantly, effective knowledge capture and transfer.

Organizations need solutions that can capture all of the salient points about a facility in one place and at the same time, and by doing so, help to drive their workflow efficiencies, improve their productivity levels and enhance their predictive capabilities.

The challenge for software vendors in the space is to work with customers to find ways that technology can be used to build efficiencies in the processes undertaken by engineers and make the programs intuitive so that less skilled operators can use them.

Simplicity is the key. Although there are many technical challenges ahead across sectors and new processes are demanding greater capabilities, there is a push to make software simpler to use, implement and support.

Continuity is equally important. When carrying out a new study of an existing process, engineers often ask: "Do we have a previous model for this?" They are above all looking for software tools that will enable them to quickly and easily optimize the efficient operation of the process in question.

A NEW MODEL
If inexperienced engineers have to sift through a vast quantity of documentation from a broad range of unconnected sources, they will inevitably find the whole process frustrating. It will also be almost impossible to verify the accuracy and the reliability of the source and avoid interpretation errors.

Instead, they need to seek out process optimization solutions that enable them to obtain a much more structured information set. In this way, they can be reassured to know that a process of sorting and classifying has already taken place, making it much easier to find information and giving the user confidence that his understanding of the data is consistent with that of the person who originally put it into the system.

The great benefit of such an approach is that the only prior knowledge users require is an understanding of how to use the software itself. In other words, it represents an effective means of optimizing knowledge transfer from one generation of engineers to the next.

The fact that the current so-called YouTube generation is more attuned to absorbing information electronically than their predecessors makes it a particularly relevant approach.

TRAINING, CONSULTANCY, SUPPORT
That said, engineering companies will obviously need to tap into some training and consultancy support from their chosen solutions vendor, especially if they have a particularly young and inexperienced workforce.

For AspenTech, this has been one of the key drivers behind the development of our simplified "expert-in-a-box" training sessions and 90-minute "lunch and learn" sessions.

Typically, of course, technical solutions, training and consultancy will also need to be supplemented by internal initiatives such as mentoring, succession planning and communication sessions to ensure that the hand-over process runs as smoothly as possible.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
Today's process engineering landscape is changing rapidly, particularly across the oil, gas and petrochemical sectors.

With many organizations no longer able to draw on the skills and expertise of highly experienced operators, automated knowledge transfer solutions that effectively close the skills gap and deliver a powerful combination of rich functionality and ease of use are likely to become ever more popular.

And the ability of vendors to support this approach with high-quality training and consultancy makes this kind of integrated solutions package even more compelling to hard-pressed engineering companies as they battle with the ongoing skills shortage problem.

Quote: Veterans with extensive knowledge and tricks of the trade are now facing retirement

John Taylor is vice president, EMEA, business consulting and sales operations at AspenTech. Previously, he spent 10 years at i2 Technologies, in a variety of senior management roles.

Author: John Taylor

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