Exclusive: ADNOC committed to national talent pool

Mubarak Amer Al Mehairbi, manager of ADNOC's Group National's Recruitment Department.

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EXCLUSIVE: Mubarak Amer Al Mehairbi, manager of ADNOC’s group national’s recruitment department on the challenges and rewards of localising an NOC engineering base.

Deploying national resources in the most beneficial way to the local economy has long been the mission statement and goal of the region’s giant national oil companies. Effective strategies and efficient execution have become the de facto mantra with regards to oil and gas reserves and production, but more than ever before that mindset is being applied to an underused asset above ground – the national talent pool.

The drive to recruit, train and retain GCC Nationals into the state-run oil companies has shifted gear recently. In the past it was not uncommon for regional energy companies to engage in job creation schemes in order to balance its remit of both delivering economic and social gains to the resident population.

However, just as the drive for efficiency in drilling, production and distribution has seen NOCs transform into slick companies on a par in many cases with their international counterparts, so too has the focus shifted in
attitudes and expectations for its workforce.

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“We have never had problems with the demand side from ADNOC and its group of companies, there are plenty of positions and important roles that need to be filled within a major oil and gas company. However, it is our strategy to redress the balance of skills-based jobs on the engineering side that in the past were almost exclusively filled by expatriate workers,” explains Mubarak Amer Al Mehairbi, manager, group national’s recruitment department, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC).

In the past the key upstream disciplines including chemical, electrical, mechanical and petroleum engineering roles were filled by expatriate labour. Al Mehairbi says that a decade ago as little as 1% of these roles were being filled by local talent, but this is now being reversed by an aggressive recruitment and training campaign with ambitious targets. “The first goal we set ourselves was to localise 50% of the engineering positions by 2004, in accordance with our competency assurance programme (CAPs). The programme has been very successful and we have since passed that target and we are aiming to achieve 75% in the course of 2009,” he says.