Safety Starts With The Right Skills - How digital is transforming training

As the oil and gas industry comes under ever-increasing scrutiny to demonstrate the steps it is taking to protect both its workers and the environment, energy companies are turning to digital training to deliver sustained improvements.

Online learning is fast replacing traditional classroom-based courses as an effective way of closing competency gaps, breaking down silos, and ensuring people have the skills they need to address tomorrow’s challenges.

Rather than a one-and-done approach, e-learning provides continuous bite-size teaching that combines different methods of learning from videos, animations, quizzes and graphics to make training stick. Training is available long term, forming a database of knowledge that users can access at a moment’s notice. This approach has been proven to be five times more effective for knowledge retention than traditional methods.

“Making sure people go to work and come home safely is the number one priority for the oil and gas industry. More recently, the regulator is quite rightly turning up the pressure on companies to show that they have clear programmes in place to ensure people have the necessary understanding and technical skills to work safely,” says Mike Adams, Co-founder of Norwell EDGE.

“Often technical training only focuses on an individual’s specific discipline but, as we have sadly seen during industry incidents, having a broad understanding of the entire upstream process is crucial if people are to react quickly and have those critical safety conversations if things go wrong. That’s why Norwell EDGE is committed to providing industry-leading digital training that spans the entire upstream lifecycle and is both affordable and quickly accessible on and offshore. Only by ensuring people have easy access to quality training can we raise standards throughout our global industry.”

Working together to improve well integrity safety

Fostering partnership working and collaborations have been central to Norwell EDGE’s success. Right from the first beta tests during the e-learning platform’s development, the company has worked closely with oil and gas operators around the globe as well as industry organisations and universities.

A cornerstone initiative is the well integrity digital learning programme that is in the final stages of development. A joint initiative by Norwell EDGE, Spirit Energy and Neptune Energy, it has also recently attracted the support of TotalEnergies and TAQA. Together, they have developed a standardised digital course for well integrity training based on Oil and Gas UK’s (OGUK) well life cycle integrity guidelines and Norwell EDGE’s e-learning technology.

Willem Boon von Ochssee, Principal Well Engineer at Spirit Energy said: “The digital well integrity training is a fantastic example of what can be achieved when the industry comes together and commits to achieving something bigger than our individual company aims. We are proud to be both part of this initiative and of the high standard of the training that has been developed. I’m looking forward to rolling this out to our people.”

It is hoped further oil and gas operators and service companies will join the initiative once it launches later this summer.

For further information about Norwell EDGE and to explore their courses visit www.norwelledge.com

Read the latest issue of the OGV Energy magazine HERE.