Even as a wave of aging workers inches toward retirement in the oil and gas industry during the next five years, new technological developments promise valuable tools to recruit and train the next generation of workers, according to a panel of experts speaking at the CXO Roundtable: Technology and the Big Crew Change conference.

C.P. Gurnani, chief executive of Mahindra Satyam Ltd., says technology has evolved and caused daily life to change in unforeseen ways. Mahindra Satyam, a Mumbai-based technology company, sponsored the forum at hotel in Houston.

"When you look at the explosion of automation in new industries, your life and mine has changed every day in the past 10 years," he says. This new wave of technologies can be used to recruit and train the next generation of workers.

Gurnani says there is a generational gap in leadership at oil and gas companies. Many of the baby boomers are retiring, but the industry is often calling them back—and in some cases paying them at a higher contract rate than their original salaries. These cases have spurred Mahindra Satyam to develop technical solutions to transfer knowledge and experience to a younger generation.

"We can be an active partner. We can always share some knowledge and experience in having worked in many industries throughout the world. But you are unique in what you do. You have a core specialization and we will never substitute your specialization. What we are good at is information technology and process management," he told industry executives at the forum.

"Where we can help the oil and gas sector is being able to manage your own thoughts onto a platform and you to be able to access that platform from any location at anytime," he says.

Train wreck

Steve Jacobs, chief operating officer of Decision Strategies Inc., says the oil and gas industry is facing a major personnel crisis as a large number of experienced individuals move closer to retirement.

Decision Strategies is a Houston-based consulting company which helps oil and gas companies analyze problems and make strategic decisions.

Many baby boomers entered the oil industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s and many of them are looking to retire in the next few years, he says. Many of these workers, like Jacobs who is now 61, entered the oil and gas industry as a roughneck in the late 1960s. He has worked in the industry his entire life.

"This is a huge bubble in our industry that is moving closer to retirement," he says, noting that some studies show that as many as half of all workers at many oil and gas companies will retire during the next five years.

If oil and gas companies cannot find ways to train a new generation of workers, Jacobs expects unforeseen problems. "There is a potential train wreck," he says. "We need new ideas."

Gurnani agrees the industry needs to find new ways to access, recruit, train and retain a younger generation of workers. This new generation of workers has a different way of learning and a different way of interacting with the world, forcing the development of new and creative training and recruiting tools.

Because of the way the new generation of workers has grown up learning, training them to do complex tasks poses challenges. "The new workforce is coming in with a different set of education expectations, a different set of tools. They will not read a manual," he says.

Social media

Because young people embrace social media so readily, Gurnani says this is probably the next best tool for recruiting and training younger workers. Many of the tools used in social media enable people to get together more quickly and easily than in the past, and this collective effort can be used to train new personnel or tackle unforeseen problems, he says.

"Social media is changing the way the world moves," he says, adding that the challenge for information management companies is not to get additional information into the hands of decision makers. Instead, it is to get timely and relevant information—and to push aside irrelevant information.

Although the new technology links workers in ways that were not previously possible, Gurnani does not foresee the core of the oil and gas industry leaving Houston. "The thought leadership is coming from here. Houston provides the global thought leadership in the oil and gas company. There will be a set of people who will always be here," he says.

But when it comes to infrastructure management, Mahindra Satyam can do that from virtually anywhere. It has two data management centers in China, two in Europe and one in India.

While data and process management are tasks which lend themselves to remote applications, not all industries are like that. "In certain cases, you have to go where the market is. There is no way to drill oil remotely," he says.

Arvind Malhotra, senior vice president of strategic accounts at Mahindra Satyam, agreed that the problem is not one of access to information. With the overload of information and its instant access, the attention span of decision makers is divided up into smaller bits.

"In today's technology-rich environment, there is a wealth of information, but this has created a poverty of attention and that is a separate issue that needs to be addressed," he says.

The challenge of modern information is sifting through the wealth of information and getting the relevant piece of information to managers at the needed time, he says.

Presentation is key

N.S. Manikantan, a principal consultant at Mahindra Satyam, says the challenge facing technology today is to get people together and synchronize their activities. He showed a video of a "virtual choir" produced by composer Eric Whitacare, who assembled video presentations of 1,752 singers from 58 different countries performing one of his compositions. The combined video is unique and something which individually none of them could have created.

"This technology allows people to unleash the creativity within them," he says. The technology allowed creative people to interact together in ways that was not previously possible. These types of solutions are applicable to individuals in industry and can address problems that they face.

"That's what we want to do, to allow people to synchronize ways of getting things done," he says. "The solution is to put creative minds together regardless of their location." Synchronization, trust, and open communications are essential for making this happen, he says.

"The technology has to integrate with business processes and operations. That's where it will drive innovation," he says. One potential training tool is to develop online training videos and even the simulation of a process in a control room.

To be effective, creators of a given technology have to think carefully about its presentation and how an end user will ultimately react with it. "We have to constantly ask ourselves, is my end user really going to use this application?"

The need to recruit and train new employees is a key application that technology companies need to address in the next few years. "It's clear we are sitting on a time bomb," he says in reference to the large number of technicians and engineers scheduled to retire from the oil and gas industry in the next five years.

The advent of social media is a key element to getting people to use a new technology. This can dramatically reduce the time it takes management to make a decision or offer them a faster response to market changes.

Space race

Scott Parent, vice president of technology at Baker Hughes Inc., says the big crew change and the use of technology in the in the energy industry is, in some ways, comparable to the race to the moon in the early 1960s. Like the space race, the challenge requires a level of integration among a diverse range of disciplines with a focus on doing things very differently as a "new sort of mission."

The challenge for recruiters in the oil and gas industry is now global, with more and more of the workforce and the production areas on international soil.

"There is clearly a higher demand for engineers around the world today," he says.

In the last 10 years, there has been a significant growth in the technology base in many of the developing countries demanding globally engineering and science. This will drive recruiters in the oil and gas industry to go where the talent is.

This posses a number of challenges as one key requirement of innovation is collaboration, which is done virtually or physically by bringing people together from remote locations in real time.

Parent says he sees the need for more engineers in a broad range of products within and outside the energy industry. "The level of engineering hours in products has just skyrocketed, driven as much by consumer products as it traditionally has been by industry."

The number of qualified engineers recruited from outside the U.S. has grown exponentially in recent years because of two factors. The first is the international growth of developing countries' industrial bases. The second is the understanding in developing countries that technology, manufacturing and industry are needed to drive job growth and economic power.

As a result, Baker Hughes employs roughly 25% of its engineers and scientists globally. It has technology centers in Russia, India and Germany and employs technologies that enable it to bring together the people with the expertise from remote locations.

"This is the means by which we are going to hire our next series of electrical and software engineers and petrophysicists," he says.

Baker Hughes believes in the value of cross-discipline teams, a practice which often gives results which are beyond those allowed when people work as individuals.

"Many times our scientists are educated in silos at universities. The geophysicists are over here, the electrical engineers are educated over there, mechanical engineers over here, and civil engineers over there," he says.

Yet, once in the workforce, many of these engineers and scientists behave the same way. "What that means is that many of them will develop incredible models that go to the boundaries of their problem or the boundaries of the way they are looking at a problem. They are not working as a collective team to solve a complex, systemic problem, or looking beyond their narrow problem definition" he says.

The next generation of technology solutions will be enhanced by more systems thinkers driving engineers and scientists of multiple disciplines working together. In addition, the practice requires professionals to value the contribution of individuals from other disciplines.

Other applications

In addition to skilled engineers, Baker Hughes foresees the need for skilled project managers to coordinate the work of highly skilled scientists and technicians. Baker Hughes has relied on them in recent years to coordinate diverse projects with multiple specialties in diverse locations. It uses technology to bring these professionals together. "Project management is a critical specialty of skills and training. The first call is usually to project management. Then we start assembling a team with the work skills," he says.

But the advent of this new technology has applications to the energy industry beyond the recruiting, training and retention of a new brand of engineers. It can, for example, be used to map the development of a new well in real time.

Parent demonstrated a technology which enables a drilling operator to map out the fracking of a well in real time. The map shows exactly where fluids are injected into shales, the extent of the microfissures they produce and the depth at which they occur.

This automated process of drilling allowed an operator to reduce the number of people on a rig and allowed real-time decisions to be made based on better information. The operators, in the case study, were looking for ways to reduce the number of workers on a rig because it can increase efficiency and reduce safety liabilities.