SPE Live Podcast: Leveraging Expertise to Prepare the Next Generation

In this SPE Live, we discuss how a large oil & gas operator made the decision to encourage young to mid-career petroleum engineers to become SPE certified.

The strategy to pursue SPE Certification was to create an avenue to recognize the level of expertise of our petroleum engineers. It was essential to company leaders to choose a globally recognized certification program such as SPE Certification. Prior to this effort, Saudi Aramco had developed a strategy to manage and retain explicit and tacit knowledge from the experienced retiring workforce through a Corporate University know as Upstream Professional Development Center (UPDC). When establishing training programs at UPDC, a critical factor was to identify principle in-house subject matter experts (SMEs) and capture their knowledge. Additionally, UPDC utilizing our in-house SMEs to deliver courses. When creating a program to prepare our young professionals for the SPE Certification, the UPDC was able to leverage existing programs and inhouse SMEs to create a program for preparing to take the SPE Certification Exam.

In this discussion, our guest discusses the details of the program and the success of the efforts as of today, achieving 98% passing rate with over 1200 engineers certified.

Speaker: Todd A. Green, Technical Advisory Group Team Lead at Aramco.

Moderated by Bob Merrill, SPE Engineering Professionalism Committee Chair