Background
Ensuring the availability of a skilled and sustainable labour
force is one of the petroleum industry's most pressing needs. This
was confirmed in The Decade Ahead, a strategic study of
human resources within the Canadian upstream petroleum industry,
produced by the Petroleum HR Council.
One of the greatest challenges for the industry in meeting the
ongoing demand for skilled labour is that, for the most part, the
petroleum industry's growth areas are in hard-to-recruit locations.
Hard-to-recruit locations are characterized as locations that are
some distance from major populations centres (rural/remote) and/or
are impacted by "hardship" factors such as lack of amenities
(education, medical and retail facilities, and housing) and spousal
employment opportunities, and/or have a higher cost of living.
Other indications of hard-to-recruit locations include turnover
rates, the length of time employment positions remain vacant and
overall recruitment costs.
Recruiting people to hard-to-recruit locations for work is just
half the battle. Companies and communities have to work even harder
to get their good people to stay. Offering employees more money is
not the answer. High labour costs severely impact a company's
bottom line and are simply not sustainable in the long term.
The petroleum industry acknowledged the need for a more innovative
and sustainable approach to attraction, retention and workforce
development - especially for hard-to-recruit locations. The new
approach needed to not only identify strategies and tactics for
companies, but also identify opportunities for industry-wide
collaboration and broader partnerships in order to be
effective.
About Increasing the Talent
The Increasing the Talent project was designed to:
- Create an awareness of strategic HR issues to improve
attraction, retention and workforce development in hard-to-recruit
locations in the petroleum industry.
- Improve collaboration with key stakeholders and promote a
culture that increases workforce productivity.
- Develop a model that identifies attraction and retention
issues, the challenges related to workforce development, and
potential, sustainable solutions.
- Compile and document an inventory of attraction, retention and
workforce development tools and resources to support the
model.
- Implement two pilot projects within hard-to-recruit
communities.
- Develop HR strategies and/or action plans for increasing the
talent and test the implementation processes, tools, and resources
of the resulting "toolkit".
To gather input for the Increasing the Talent project,
the Petroleum HR Council interviewed over 100 representatives of a
broad range of industry companies, federal, provincial, territorial
and municipal governments, women's groups, industry associations,
immigrant groups, unions, post-secondary institutions, chambers of
commerce, and Aboriginal groups. A steering committee of 15
industry and stakeholder representatives, as well as
representatives from the Alberta and BC governments, provided
direction throughout the project.
Project Results
The project's first achievement was the development of the
Increasing the
Talent model to provide a structured approach to
addressing the issues. A thorough review of secondary research
confirmed that no other models encompassed the broad range of
factors that explained the attraction, retention and workforce
development issues experienced by the industry. Therefore, the
comprehensive Increasing the Talent model needed to be built from
"scratch" creating what is believed to be the first model of its
kind.
While the intention of the model development project was to focus
on hard-to-recruit locations, feedback from the industry confirms
that the resulting product is applicable to attraction, retention
and workforce development for all its operational locations.
After the initial development of the Increasing the
Talent model, a series of validation sessions was held to
verify the model and identify its use in the attraction, retention
and workforce development process.
Then two six-month pilot projects, in Fort St. John and Grande
Prairie, were conducted to test and validate the Increasing the
Talent toolkit. (See press releases below.) During these pilots, a
number of Implementation Tools were
developed.
Following the pilots, a successful Supervisor Training pilot was
held in Brooks, Alberta. This pilot workshop will help guide the
Petroleum HR Council as it expands into delivering services such as
workshops.
The ultimate project result was the Increasing
the Talent online toolkit, an innovative
resource designed to help industry and its stakeholders understand
attraction, retention and workforce development issues and
challenges, particularly as they pertain to hard-to-recruit
locations. Increasing the Talent provides a sensible
starting point for identifying potential, sustainable solutions to
the industry's labour challenges.
The Increasing the Talent toolkit includes:
Items for Download