Having a knowledgeable and qualified staff is crucial for the success and growth of any business. Nowadays most companies would be more inclined to hire professionals for their important positions, who already have a very thorough understanding of what the responsibilities of those positions imply, backed-up with a fair amount of practical experience in the field.
I don’t think it’ll come as a surprise to you if I say that every single business will adopt a strategy to align its processes with all the external factors, which in one way or the other may have an impact on its success (or at least will try to do so). Being able to adapt fast to the ever-changing circumstances has arguably become the most important trait a business should possess. After all, it’s not the strongest who survives and thrives, but the one who is most adaptable to change (yes, Charles Darwin was the one who said these words first).
And since every business operates somewhat differently from any other, or should I dare to say – out of bounds of the traditional understanding of how “things must be done”, it becomes evidently clear that no matter how good the aforementioned professional is, he or she will most likely need some on-the-job training to be able to fully integrate with the new environment and be at the peak of his/her performance.
This is true in any business, in any field of operations. But let’s narrow our scope and talk a bit about the Oilfield.
With it’s unique characteristics Oilfield is not the easiest environment to run a successful business (just stating the obvious). There are tons of circumstances that can, and most likely will become an obstacle on your way, and if you’re not prepared to tackle those, or even more importantly – if the opportunity presents itself – use one or two to your advantage, your business will need to focus on how to survive rather than on how to thrive.
Now, I am not going to pretend to be an expert when it comes to factors, such as:
- constantly growing hyper-competitiveness,
- limited sources for supply,
- being geographically disperse and thus, highly susceptible to political influence in different regions of the world,
- and many more,
which govern (or maybe I should say dictate?) how the global oil industry evolves, and how it can affect any local business. But when it comes to the smallest variable in the industry, that being a single company, I strongly believe that the most important asset it can have is it’s highly qualified, professional team, each member of which knows exactly how to do what needs to be done in the most efficient way.
And if we circle back a little, we come to a point that yes, no matter how highly qualified our professionals are, they will need to be trained on specific aspects and tools of your business operations. Especially if you employ tools that are highly specific to your company’s daily and overall operations, such as for example
operations management systems or ERPs are.
Over the course of the past few decades different companies have employed different ways to train their new and/or existing personnel, starting from internships and in-house trainings to mentoring and external training.
At the end of the day, the goal is the same – help the trainee become fluent, skilled and comfortable with the subject of the training, and the best way to achieve that goal is to have your staff trained by someone who is an expert with a significant experience AND knows how to provide training. This someone may be another member of your current staff, a consultant in a specific field, and so on. If it comes to riger® clients or prospects, it might one of riger® team members.
So if you ask me how much of an impact a “personnel training” can have on the success of the business, I would answer – significant, and elaborate a little- stating that it will:
- help to make your team more efficient and motivated,
- result in a significant increase in productivity and the quality of the tasks performed,
- reduce mistakes, errors and complaints associated with those,
- end up being more cost-effective (even if you pay for training),
- and above all – save you a lot of precious time.
To train its staff or not, is up to any individual business, but what is obvious is that there won’t be much of a progress (if any at all) without constant, continuous learning and self-development.
