Summary

This article discusses how oil and gas procurement leaders can create top teams through strategic hiring, specialized training, and retention strategies to foster business growth.

The global oil and gas industry is currently regarded as one of the most influential markets in the world. It impacts everything, including transportation, heating, electricity, industrial production, and manufacturing, and plays a tremendous role in the global economic framework.

One key factor helping drive this 7.1 trillion dollar industry forward is the procurement function. With the responsibility of setting the contracts, identifying potential supplies, and mitigating supply chain disruption, a business’s procurement team undoubtedly helps define overall profit margins.

With this in mind, understanding how to create the perfect procurement team is a game-changing element. This article will elaborate on building and managing workforce development so that you, as a procurement leader or director, can steer your business toward growth and continuity.

Table of Contents:

The Scope of Procurement Workforce in the Oil & Gas Industry

For an effective and efficient workforce development strategy, it is vital to understand what procurement in the oil and gas industry entails. Here’s a quick overview of what key responsibilities the hiring and development teams must consider:

  1. Strategic Sourcing: Identifying and securing optimal suppliers for goods and services such as drilling equipment, pipelines, and chemicals.
  2. Contract Negotiation: Achieving favorable terms and conditions for the company’s rights, such as pricing, payment terms, delivery schedules, and performance guarantees.
  3. Supplier Relationship Management: Building and cultivating strong partnerships with suppliers to ensure business continuity.
  4. Cost Optimization: Implementing strategies to optimize procurement expenses.
  5. Risk Management: Identifying and mitigating potential supply chain disruptions.
  6. Compliance Management: Adhering to industry regulations and company policies.

With the scope of procurement in mind, let’s dive into building and developing your workforce effectively.

Also Read: How to Choose the Right Enterprise Training Solutions for Your Company?

Three Practices to Build a High-Performance Procurement Team

The scope of the procurement role is vast, yet it is a primary driver of business continuity. Building the right team is the first step in solidifying this crucial function. Here are three essential talent acquisition practices that you need to incorporate to ensure high performance,

1. Skill Prioritization

Prioritizing what skills you need during recruitment will steer the productivity of your business. Here are two skill set categories vital to oil and gas procurement:

  1. Soft Skills: Supply chain management heavily relies on communication quality. The talent you choose to onboard must demonstrate strength or potential in soft skills such as strategic communication, project presentation, negotiation, and conflict management.
  2. Problem-Solving Skills: Aside from the experience relevant to achieving your business goals, managing operational and strategic disruptions is part and parcel of the supply chain function. Your team needs personnel who exhibit creativity and resilience in problem-solving and systematic bottleneck management.

2. Strategic Hiring

A business’s workforce development should not be for the short term. As a continuous improvement approach, you must adopt strategic hiring to strengthen your current procurement team and cultivate talent for your future business needs.

Here are two strategic hiring practices to secure high performance consistently:

  1. Strategic Diversity: An effective hiring strategy is hiring to add expertise that your team needs. Whether it’s proficiency in the latest technology or process optimizations, adding a strategic hire will help your team become more diverse and also help improve overall competence through information-sharing sessions.
  2. Talent Pipeline Building: Creating a stream of qualified candidates secures the quality of operations no matter the timeline. Invest in building a robust talent pipeline through internships, graduate programs, and early career development initiatives. This approach also fosters a positive brand image and long-term talent development.

3. Employee Onboarding

While hiring is key, your onboarding process must help employees integrate into a team from day one. Here are two practices to ensure seamless employee onboarding:

  1. Clear Communication: In addition to vetting your candidate as a fit for your business values, you must incorporate a comprehensive onboarding process to communicate your company culture, organizational processes, procurement system, tools, and expectations.
  2. Sufficient Hand-Holding: To ensure that your new employees reach their full productivity, it is key to guide them during the initial phases. This can be done by assigning a mentor and a two-person buddy system within the team to help them acclimate to the new profile.

With these practices in mind, let’s focus on learning effective talent development for your oil and gas procurement.

Two Elements of Effective Procurement Talent Development

For your business to flourish, talent acquisition for your procurement team is only the first of two steps. You must also effectively invest in talent development and retention. Here are the two elements of talent development that drive the existing workforce to reach its full potential:

1. Industry-Specific Training

Procurement, in itself, is a highly specific role that evolves with technical and commercial changes. To effectively keep your workforce relevant and skilled, targeted and industry-specific training programs from digital solution experts like Hurix Digital are an excellent strategy to adopt. This includes conducting workshops, seminars, and certifications in contract law, supply chain management, and risk assessment. It also involves preparing your team for the latest changes, like the new energy landscapes.

It is also important to encourage employees to pursue professional development opportunities and adopt effective learning management systems for tracking certifications. With this and routine updates to relevant training materials, your business also adopts a continuous learning approach to enhance employee skills and knowledge.

2. Talent Retention

This second element of talent development focuses on keeping your high-performing team engaged, driven, and happy. While the hiring, onboarding, and training process is intended to secure long-term gains, it is also a significant investment, making talent retention vital for both operational productivity and the bottom line.

This can be effectively done through conscious dialogues and active efforts to create a positive workplace. Here are some practices that help retain talent:

  1. Consider Employee Aspirations: Set an open dialogue to discuss performance and expectations. Here, it is essential to understand what opportunities each team member needs for their professional growth and comfort.
  2. Rewards and Recognition: Take time to recognize and reward achievements and efforts. This helps create a strong company culture that fosters loyalty and commitment.
  3. Foster Inclusivity: This involves creating a work environment that provides equal opportunities and celebrates differences. It is also important to provide unconscious bias training irrespective of organizational hierarchy.

Apart from these two elements, talent development and retention can also be strengthened through systematic performance management and regular and transparent reviews.

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Elevating Procurement Talent in Oil & Gas Procurement

Workforce development is a fundamental part of every business, but it applies especially to procurement functions in relatively volatile industries such as Oil and Gas. As we’ve covered in this article, oil and gas procurement has an extensive profile that needs special attention to develop the right team.

With the key practices and strategies that we’ve covered, your business is now supercharged with a comprehensive understanding of how to effectively build and retain a high-performance team. For the right training solutions and staffing strategies, it’s important to partner with experts like Hurix Digital, who’ve been leading the industry with their customized solutions.

So, let’s not hesitate! Set up a discovery call with us today!