E-Learning Approaches Can Help Solve the Oil Sands Labor Shortage

The Alberta Oil Sands represent the second highest proven petroleum reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia. That's a lot of oil, and it underlines the fact that the biggest obstacle currently facing the oil industry isn't oil in the ground - it's a shortage of qualified people.

Despite the "roughneck" image many people have of the oil industry, the sector relies very heavily on highly-skilled and highly-trained workers. The fact these workers often get their hands dirty - literally - only makes their skill set unique from, say, computer programming or business administration.

The labor shortage has a number of causes. It isn't unique to the oil sands alone, and it's not new, either. It's common to the oil industry as a whole, and it has been for a while.

In 2001, for instance, the Petroleum Technology Transfer Council (PTTC) - a U.S.-based oil industry organization - was already lamenting the "dwindling supply of petroleum engineers, geologists and geophysicists". The organization further noted "the number of projects a given producing company engineer is responsible for has increased by more than 50% since 1990, and by 300% since 1970." Fewer people available to do more tasks is a real "rock and a hard place" issue that the entire oil sector faces.

The same PTTC newsletter states there are two ways for successful oil companies to address this issue:

• Make it easier for fewer people to accomplish more through better handling of information


• Improve the way professional knowledge is managed, expanded and conserved.

E-learning offers many advantages to the oil sector.

E-learning uses the Internet to bridge distance and time. With e-learning, a worker in a camp outside Fort McMurray can be learning new and better ways to do her job despite being an hour's drive from the city or even a continent away from the head office of the company she works for.

E-learning is flexible and easily allows the right information to be put in the hands - better still, the mind - of the worker who needs it, when they need it. E-learning isn't limited to formal courses. It can be made available to answer questions on specific topics, so the oil sands worker can review the steps she needs to take to draw a sample, for instance, right before she has to carry out the task - rather than trying to remember it from a course she took a month before.

E-learning also speeds up training, compressing the time required to gain new knowledge by comparison with instructor led training. E-learning does this by allowing learning to be more focused on an individual's needs and by being available to the learner without a rigid schedule.

We've seen these solutions work first-hand in our own experiences developing and deploying e-learning for oil sands projects. Join us at the GO Expo in Calgary June 12 to 14 or just contact us through the form on this website -we'd be happy to share our experiences with you.