HALIS LAROUSSI, TEAM LEAD – ADMINISTRATION

Hassi Messaoud is the main logistics, procurement and administration support centre for our projects in the south of the country. Leading the admin team there is Halis, who is from Algiers. He says a typical day can involve anything and everything.

I’m from the capital Algiers… although I’ve now spent most of my life in the south of Algeria! All the oil and gas projects are in this part of the country. I started my career in 1996 and worked with a municipality government. I then worked in quality control for different oil and gas companies before joining Petrofac.

I joined the Petrofac support team in Algeria 11 years ago... Three years later I became team leader, in charge of the Hassi Messaoud operations. We have to ensure everything runs smoothly to avoid any problems. We also support the projects – this can be any kind of support. Logistics, manpower, liaising with authorities, organising travel… anything and everything. Ultimately, the team is here to help our people work well and fulfil their duties on the projects.

I enjoy helping people… When people ask for help – even if the work is not assigned to us – we are always there, it’s no problem. Our position is also multi-functional; my role is team leader but it’s very diverse and can cover everything from HSE to security. I also support the business development team. The Algerian government halted the development of new projects during the pandemic; however, the country should start to open up more this year and I’m looking forward to supporting Petrofac to grow.

It's a very exciting time for us… For the past two months we have been working on the reopening of the training centre which has been closed for two years because of COVID. The training centre is very important for people in Algeria and for the community in the south of the country. It helps people to find jobs and it has trained 1,000 locals since it opened. We are also looking to bring in more people to the training centre in different disciplines: electrical, welding, mechanical. We feel we’re doing something worthwhile here.

We have created a very strong team at Hassi Messaoud… Everyone helps each other; we’re one team. I believe it’s very important to continue learning and learn from our previous mistakes. I don’t come here just to work, I also come here to learn. My advice would be to multi-task in your role and I always encourage my team to push themselves.

Meet a few of our colleagues in Algeria