Petrofac Academy helps build tomorrow’s safety leaders

As our young graduates develop their careers within Petrofac, it’s crucial they understand the importance of health and safety and how it underpins the successful growth of the company.

Encouraging people to be mindful of risk and to work safely can sometimes be challenging.  However, the Sharjah based Petrofac Academy is hoping to change this through an interactive HSSE module. The module is being run in conjunction with our Engineering, Construction, Operations and Maintenance (ECOM) HSSE team and forms part of the Petrofac Academy Graduate development programme.

Greg Ross, HSSE Director of Petrofac’s Offshore Capital Projects (OCP) business gives an overview of the programme:

The five day programme forms an essential part of the Academy’s focus on HSSE, covering Safety Leadership and Culture, Worksite Hazards, and our Tools and Rules.  78 graduates took part in Sharjah, and their training included role play, working groups and case studies.

Last month, the first batch of graduates to be mobilised to site also undertook a ‘Preparing for Site’ day at Denholm Yam fabrication plant. Onsite, they applied their training into practice and experienced site culture first hand.  The purpose was for the graduates to take Petrofac’s Golden Rules of Safety to site, test their hazard spotting skills and practise safety interventions.

“When the graduates finish and are mobilised to site, we want them to have the competence and confidence to lead on safety, and they’re passionate about it!” Greg says. “We want them to understand the important role they play in safety. That they have a duty to intervene when they have safety concerns, and if they stay silent, they consent to working unsafely”.

As Greg explains, “We want to create an interdependent safety culture, where people are not only aware of risks to themselves, but also look out for others.  Our graduates have a key role to play here, and in fact they came up with the mantra ‘All for one, one for all’ as the culture they want to develop at site”.

The training programme helps to achieve this through creative, challenging and engaging learning.  For Greg, it’s about the “stickiness of the message” – the funny, unusual or moving elements of the training that will help the participants to remember what they have learned.  “I’m looking for the ‘tipping point’, that moment when an idea or way of behaving spreads and becomes the norm.  We are training the future leaders of Petrofac and we want to them to lead the wave of change.”