Learning by coaching
Introduction
Traditional courses have a solid place in our industry for
training young E&P geoscientists and engineers. These courses
typically last several days/weeks and target groups of students.
Although this concept is working well for basic and intermediate
courses, more advanced courses providing a pre-defined content of
several advanced and at times independent modules are often, at
least partially, ineffective:
- For most of the students, only part of the material will be of
interest,
- The pace will be either too low or too high for most of the
students,
- There is usually too little time for dedicated personal
attention,
- Availability of courses is usually not at the right time,
- Once back at their desks, applying what was learned is not
always straightforward,
- It is unlikely that one single teacher is sufficiently
knowledgeable on all advanced subjects.
This is why EPTS also offers the concept of
coaching to partially replace or supplement classroom
training courses.
What does EPTS mean with coaching?
EPTS sees coaching as a rather wide variety of support methods
to provide a more direct, focussed and personal approach to improve
the client's quality of work and can take several forms depending
on the purpose:
- Development of individual's discipline skills. Young
employees often require assistance to help them progress their
skills and their projects. In larger companies this assistance may
be available inhouse, but in many organisations it is difficult to
find good internal coaches with sufficient time and interest.
- Workshops with small groups to address a particular
subject. Typically, areas that require a high degree of integration
would benefit from this approach with the relevant subsurface
disciplines represented in the target group. If needed, a coaching
team of different disciplines can be involved.
- Reviewing work done, either specialized
discipline work, or teamwork, like an integrated reservoir
modelling project, to help the team to progress. This can be done
either in "assist" mode or to provide an independent "quality
assurance":
- In Assist mode it is essential to be involved early in
the project to enable steer up front rather than when all the work
is completed.
- Quality control of work done to provide a basis for
project quality management. Often, QC is done by colleagues from a
different team or even within the same group. This would provide an
independent view or second opinion.
- Coaching a company or a team to improve
performance by building or improving and implementing internal
guidelines and standardised workflows.
Coaching can be opted for at the time it is needed and at a pace
that matches the needs. It is an optimal form of "on the job
training" and frequently provides more tangible results than formal
classroom. If necessary, it can be done remotely to a large
extent.
How will it work
Coaching support can be accomplished through a call-off contract
with a simple hour-rate. In consultation, a (series of) remote
session(s) is set up to identify and address the knowledge gap(s)
and to estimate the required amount of time.
EPTS experts
EPTS experts are all very experienced geoscientists and
petroleum engineers and have spent most of their career in Shell.
They are well equipped to help with "on the job" coaching,
either as follow-on after delivering a regular course, or as a
separate activity. Check their CV's under "about us".