Insight: An explorer's career development and training
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
In my experience, there is an absolute link between an explorer's career development, their acquisition of key skills, and training.
I review a few ideas in this article.
This ‘ladder’ defines what might be the career development of a typical explorer having joined a company with an M.Sc or Ph.D, perhaps via a structured graduate intake program. In my experience, ascending this ‘ladder’ can take the first 10 years of an individual’s career. Of course, other opportunities may lie beyond the Exploration Manager level…….
As the career progresses, a range of skills will be developed and I have tried to summarise the key ones, once more using the career ‘ladder’ as a template.
It is this notion of Key Skills being acquired and developed that have shaped the training scheme outlined below:
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Now if this was a simple sheet of paper, produced from Word, the word DRAFT would be highly visible in the watermark, and I assume that others will think I have missed out important components. For example, there is no explicit mention of structural geology or seismic stratigraphy (some of my ex-colleagues at BP would be shocked to their boots!) but I consider that these are both absolutely key components of what I have termed Seismic Interpretation….I simply can’t imagine a useful seismic interpretation being produced without a sound underpinning of these two components.
This is just a start to defining what a high quality training program might look like, that's all.
Author: David Bamford
Company: Finding Petroleum