Petrofac Supports New Graduates

Petrofac, the international oil & gas facilities service provider, has welcomed ten new graduates to its Aberdeen operations and is supporting them towards achieving chartered engineer status.

Petrofac HR manager, Carol Taylor, explains that after an initial induction, the trainees start out on a series of six, two-monthly placements to learn different aspects of the business. “Our scheme has been accredited by the Chartered Institute of Mechanical Engineers as a monitored personal development programme,” she says. “Part of that is the mentoring that the graduates receive throughout this whole period.”

S&y Merson, a 23-year-old mechanical engineering graduate from Aberdeen University, says that the wide range of placements was one of the things that attracted him to Petrofac. “I spent periods offshore, in health, safety, environment and quality, facilities engineering and design engineering in my first year of training as an operations engineer,” he recalls.

“Now I’m busy on a six-month project both on and offshore to review and update the technical drawings on the Kittiwake platform. The variety of challenges I have been given has been very stimulating.”

Fellow Aberdonian, 24-year-old Ross Copl& joined Petrofac in this year’s intake. A mechanical engineering graduate from Robert Gordon’s University, he spent a year travelling in Thail& and Australasia before returning home. “I’m in the first phase of the training scheme and am currently working on an offshore incident investigation,” he says. “I was attracted to the company due to its track record in training graduates, whilst helping them towards achieving chartered engineer status.”

Ekua Osei, a graduate trainee in the Brownfield division, was born in London but brought-up in Ghana. She took a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in the USA before being awarded a master’s degree in chemical engineering by Leeds University.

She has a strong interest in energy and the environment so the oil & gas industry was where she wanted to be. “Petrofac seemed to fit the bill as it has ambitious growth plans. My university in Virginia was quite small so we got a lot of one-to-one attention and Petrofac seemed to have the same approach.” Osei is currently working at Marathon House on a pipeline project for Equatorial Guinea.

Elsewhere in Petrofac, graduates continue to be attracted to the company, with the 2006 year’s intake of the Engineering & Construction division comprising 17 graduates for its Woking office and 51 for its office in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. New recruits are taken through a number of structured development programmes and are regarded as fundamental to the future success of the business.