How Technology is Helping Companies Audit Contractor Competency

With more than 4,000 additional workers estimated to support scheduled maintenance and integrity activity in the North Sea, finding contractors with the right skills and experience to carry out work safely and efficiently is critical for oil and gas.

Our industry undertakes inherently high-risk operations so it is not difficult to imagine the consequences - in terms of costs, reputation and, ultimately, safety - which could be caused by hiring people who aren’t up to the job.

In challenging and often hazardous environments, a workforce lacking the necessary competencies puts projects, assets, the environment and lives at risk.

So, how do companies ensure they have the right people in the right roles?

Digital innovation has helped the oil and gas sector drive down costs and become more efficient but the industry has perhaps been slower to embrace the benefits of digital training.

One of the major advantages of an effective digital training platform is that a worker’s training history stays with them as they move throughout their careers, allowing companies to confirm what courses have been completed.

With Norwell EDGE, for example, workers receive digitally verifiable certification when they successfully complete assessments. And, our new digital trade test allows companies to quickly screen senior candidates and filter critical project teams.

This allows learners’ progress to be tracked and measured, programmes to be tailored to meet exact requirements and all personnel, from graduates to the most senior to be put through their paces.

Digital training is inherently flexible and efficient - it can fit around operational requirements and can reduce travel and accommodation costs associated with delivering traditional classroom-based courses in a fixed location.

Crucially it also helps improve learning outcomes with regular bite-sized training and assessments, proving more effective than one-off courses. It’s not just about courses being online. The gamification of learning, advances in animation, combined with Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality help improve knowledge retention while also providing a modern environment to learn – and more importantly fail safely.

Robust training data coupled with rigorous assessment allows companies to ensure the right people are involved in projects, promoting efficient, effective and safe work. This is a goal we should all be striving for in 2020.