Petrofac Academy graduates benefit from business awareness sessions

As part of the Petrofac Academy Graduate Development Programme, graduates are regularly invited to business awareness sessions that develop their skill sets and teach them about the Company’s services and operations. One such session took place recently with eighty engineering graduates in Sharjah attending an event hosted by Plant Asset Management (PAM), an asset performance management consultancy within Petrofac.

Through a combination of technical and business awareness sessions, graduates learned about the role asset management and integrity play in the design and operation of oil and gas plants. Other disciplines were also discussed including the importance of consulting and sales and business development skills for any career path.

Geoff Baker, Senior Vice President – Consulting at PAM, also spent time with the graduates discussing entrepreneurial behaviour and its importance in a dynamic company like Petrofac. As one of the co-founders of PAM - and founder of Entrepreneurial Engineers - he shared some of his personal experiences as an entrepreneur with the eager graduates.

Another notable highlight at the sessions was an interactive reliability simulation exercise for asset management. Graduates played a board game that reflects the journey and challenges faced whilst moving from a reactive to pro-active maintenance mind-set. In real life, this takes a company five to seven years to accomplish, but each team only had a few hours to determine the best ways to manage equipment, time, labour, materials and money in a simulated environment. This gave them valuable first-hand experience of real business pressures, need for production, waste and lost time management, financial results and the effects of poor reliability.

There was lots of positive feedback from the event, with one graduate appreciating the opportunity to learn about our subsidiary companies. They commented “we got an in-depth understanding to what consultants actually do and where PAM stands amongst other companies of the same category”.

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