Building the capability to deliver strategic outcomes for a global oil and gas business through workforce planning

How can you bridge a capability gap in a highly competitive market - with a brand that a new generation of engineers might be ruling out?

The future will be powered by renewable energy. That’s a challenge for our client, a global oil and gas giant. The IT organisation in their downstream unit needed to attract a new breed of talent to lead them into this new future. Baringa was brought in to create an approach to finding people at pace, with the scarce and in-demand skills to fuel the mission.

We helped our client to crystallise their strategic people plan

Our client was clear on their problem. They needed to compete in a hot skills market, with a breadth of competitors, all focused on the race to renewable power. They needed to build a strong workforce across a range of scarce skills in both IT engineering and renewable power, so that they could build their future organisation and deliver to their core strategy. They had hundreds of open positions and the current workforce was feeling the strain. How would they attract ‘hot skills’ at pace, when their brand was one that could deter applications?

Our solution was to work with the client to create a capability framework for the skills they needed, in order that this could be used to pinpoint when, where and what level the ‘demand profile’ would be for these skills over the coming years. We tidied up vacancy data, removing duplicate roles and jobs that were no longer needed – and used the framework to pinpoint roles that were important for delivering the strategy. Our next focus was operational: identifying steps that would add people to the recruitment pipeline as soon as possible.

All of this made the difference but given the volume of demand and competitive landscape for skills, we were clear that long-term success would come from building our client’s ability to develop candidates with potential. We had noticed a trend in rejections for hire because candidates didn’t ‘tick every box’. Our capability framework came back to the fore as we worked with existing experts to curate and build a learning academy for foundational skills. This would form part of the new Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and, along with the clear purpose of working on renewables, help to attract talent in the marketplace.

Our client now has a clear roadmap for the attraction of scarce skills, as well as a framework to identify and plan their requirements. This is backed by a learning academy that provides the foundations of future careers in renewable power. Their approaches to sourcing, recruitment and learning provides them with a more strategic approach to building their workforce for the future.

Find out how we help our clients in Energy and Resources