ONE PETROLEUM COMPANY'S PERSPECTIVE ON THE GLOBAL GEOSCIENCE WORKFORCE OF THE 21st CENTURY
Like most business and academic sectors, the global petroleum industry is becoming increasingly complex. The list of our competitors has evolved from a simple one of major, publicly traded oil and gas companies to one that now includes national oil companies, utilities, and suppliers. Also, until recently shales were considered only as source or seal rocks, and not the unconventional oil and gas opportunity they are today.
The 21st century geoscience workforce must adjust to this increased complexity. An "everyone knows everything" model is not practical. But a model in which scientists have limited knowledge outside of their home disciplines is the one in which many of us find ourselves today, and it is this status quo which we would like to change. Two workforce strategies, neither of which is new, could be effective in bridging the chasm between these end members.
The first strategy is for undergraduate programs to maintain an earth systems approach while giving greater weight to the non-geoscience portions of their curricula. The ability to communicate clearly and concisely is critical to working better with regulatory bodies, engineers, scientists, and new stakeholders, who increasingly come from other cultures and speak different languages. Greater emphasis on mathematics, English, foreign languages, and social sciences would yield dividends both in the ability to integrate data from multiple sources and in communicating with more diverse stakeholders.
The second strategy is to place greater emphasis on leadership in a highly networked workplace. In the typical organizational model of 30 years ago, lines and boxes on an organizational chart did a much better job of describing work relationships. Today, lines and boxes still describe governance, but most work actually gets done through informal, multi-disciplinary networks that reach outside of organizational boundaries. In this context, leadership requires the ability to frame problems in language that crosses disciplinary and organizational boundaries, to identify resources, and to enunciate win-win solutions that attract support from both internal and external stakeholders. Development of such leadership must take place in our organizations, but should also occur on campus through modified pedagogies that focus on multi-disciplinary topics.