The BEST Awards recognize organizations that demonstrate enterprise-wide success as a result of employee talent development. The winners use learning as a strategic business tool to get results. View the entire list of 2023 BEST Award winners.

To create a future-ready workforce, talent development professionals in the energy industry are assessing skills gaps in their workforces and creating learning initiatives to prepare current and future employees for future challenges.

For example, to maintain its focus on oil and gas, sustainability, safety, and respect for people and environment, Latin America's Petrobras needed to focus on developing the critical skills of its workforce. The TD department created the SoftSkills Development Program, which includes training initiatives on communication, creativity, emotional intelligence, engagement, innovation, mindfulness, stress management, and teamwork. As of December 2022, more than 12,000 employees participated in those new training courses.

Additionally, a separate team within the corporate university focuses on digital transformation and innovation. It has developed more than 50 training programs aimed at preparing employees for new roles as well as more than 100 open courses in nine knowledge areas. By year-end 2022, more than 1,400 employees completed the training initiatives and another 3,700 were working toward completion of the upskilling programs.

"The world of work continues to evolve, and the business context is undergoing rapid transformation, with new technologies and the global energy transition demanding even more extensive collaboration and innovation from our employees," says Danilo Garbazza, head of Petrobras University. "People management in the company is crucial for the execution of our strategies and the achievement of the expected results. Our human resources area focuses on valuing professionals and creating the necessary conditions for each one to fulfill their full potential."

Indian Oil Corporation Limited, a government-owned oil and gas company in India, also realized that, to prepare employees for the future, defining needed skills is critical.

The TD team developed learning initiatives based on a technical competency framework, Swadhyaya. Under the framework, the team defined 575 technical competencies for 70 organizational functions. Each competency has four proficiency levels: basic, intermediate, advanced, and expert.

E-learning content targeting all proficiency levels totaled 850 hours of learning. The TD department created 1,750 learning modules and plans to add 550 more hours in the next three years.

In Swadhyaya 1.0, the learning management system hosted 600-plus hours of e-learning content targeting different competencies and using multiple methodologies such as traditional multimedia courses, audio podcasts, videocasts, interactive PDFs, and augmented and virtual reality. In Swadhyaya 2.0, the focus is on creating e-learning content of higher interactivity level through an additional 200 hours of learning content. To date, more than 22,000 active learners have completed 2.5 million courses.

"The talent demand in the oil and gas business is scaling up in an unprecedented way," says Ranjan Kumar Mohapatra, HR director of Indian Oil Corporation Limited. "The talent attractiveness in the energy industry needs a strong impetus in the minds of the best talent. Due to unique, well-balanced, and business-aligned talent practices, I believe that our organization is strongly positioned to face these challenges and deliver our energy promise to the nation."