Description
Soft Skills Council: A New SPE Initiative
Presentation for SPE Gulf Coast Section Career Management Study Group
on Oct. 18, 2012 in Houston Texas
An increasing demand for energy, complexity of resources, developing new technologies, management of the supply and demand for skilled human workforce, and the urgency of rapid knowledge transfer are daunting challenges for our industry. Future industry professionals must equip themselves with an expanded set of competencies that include organizational abilities to effectively develop and deliver technical solutions—soft skills.
SPE formed the Soft Skills Council to help SPE fulfill its mission, vision, and values and to respond to a growing conversation within the industry about the need to help our professionals develop interpersonal skills to add business value in the future.
In today’s multicultural global organizations, workers are expected to display greater creativity and autonomy for problem solving. To cope with modern complexities, we need to learn and refine a number of important non-technical competencies that have a great impact on the bottom line.
The essence of the council’s message includes the following key elements:
- The global nature of our business has broader implications relating socio-economic, cultural, and regional dimensions.
- Human capabilities and actions ultimately determine the success of our industry. The nature and the role of our industry in the emerging global complexity demands that our capabilities and actions expand beyond technical knowledge.
- The increasing role of technology and the mixture of social, environmental, political, and economic constructs across our industry require finer attunement and shedding of parochial paradigms.
- While our industry is recognized for solving complex technical problems, in contrast, developing soft skills is a process of discovery and augmentation of otherwise underdeveloped or hidden capabilities.
- Competency enhancement of our industry professionals will determine its credibility and image.
- Integration, alignment, and coordination of a broad spectrum of soft skills related activities across the SPE landscape is a precursor to its sustainability and success.
Susan Howes is Reservoir Management Organizational Capability Consultant in the Reservoir Management group at Chevron. Previous assignments include Reservoir Management Framework and Standards Consultant, and Manager of the Horizons Program, Chevron’s Technical Competency Development program. Howes is formerly Learning and Organizational Development Manager at Anadarko. Her 25+ year career includes various engineering assignments in Denver and Houston, including responsibilities in reservoir management, recruiting and career development for engineers, managing acquisition and divestment projects, economic evaluation, reservoir studies and simulation of conventional and unconventional reservoirs.