KOC at "Walks the Talk"

T&CD Group Manager Qusai Al-Amer recently met with a delegation of T&CD Group employees who participated as presenters in various international events over the last fiscal year. During the meeting, Al-Amer took the opportunity to recognize their willingness and enthusiasm to be involved in this international initiative. Meanwhile, the T&CD Group employees shared their experiences and discussed how proud they were to be KOC envoys during the events that happened internationally.   

 

The T&CD Group has been working on developing and enhancing KOC’s External Conference Management as a business process with foundations that foster a learning organization leveraged by the potential that international conferences offer to KOC employees. By exchanging information during the knowledge sharing activities and networking with professionals from around the world, KOC employees are able to develop their technical competence while promoting an organizational culture of planning for various conferences. Company officials said they hoped this initiative would also enhance the culture of KOC employees presenting papers and presentations during regional and international conferences and exhibitions. This, in turn, will do much in the way of bolstering KOC’s reputation as a leader in the oil and gas industry.

 

 

 

The T&CD Group is committed to “Walk the Talk.” During the past fiscal year, an initiative was launched to increase the number of Group conference attendants as presenters. Al-Amer has led the project in cooperation with Dr. Olimpia Salas Guzman, and as a result of this new strategy, KOC has experienced a substantial increase in the ratio of attendees to presenters. This undertaking has been met with great success after Group experts and senior employees were matched with young employees with a vision to better prepare them for international conferences by developing their presentation skills and abilities.

 

This initiative is supported by senior management and has been prepared and implemented under the direct supervision of Manager Al Amer, while Specialist Olympia Salas Guzman is responsible for coordination between the different stakeholders, most notably the speakers themselves.

We selected a group of those employees and met them in the presence of Salas Guzman, in order to get to know from them personally on this subject. They spoke with great enthusiasm, which was reinforced by their young and ambitious spirit.

 

Sara Ahmad, a Training Officer specialized in Industrial Engineering from Training Competency Team was the first to speak. She indicated that she has participated in the “Get Energy” Education Oil conference held in Milan, Italy, last January, where she made a presentation about the relationship between Oil industry and specifically KOC, and between the universities and educational institutes in the field of training and its benefits.

She explained that her paper talked about how to use and integrate the needs within the recruitment plan, and how this affects the training provided by the company in universities, adding that the paper also dealt with how to develop officials in the company, and what are the universities that deal with the company and ways of dealing, the reason for the selection of these types of universities, and also how the contents of the training were prepared.

 

She revealed that she participated in several workshops on the sidelines of the conference. She expressed her pride in choosing her to represent the company and provide a working paper, considering that this constitutes a strong impetus and a message of confidence. The method of presentation according to the principles prepared by the company was professional and organized, wishing that she could present a case study in the future.

 

 

 

For his part, Hamad Al Adasani from Manpower and Transfer Team expressed his pleasure to be given the opportunity to participate in the same conference “Get Energy”, where he discussed the same subject, but in terms of how to develop the work.

Al-Adasani said that he participated in an external conference five years ago, shortly after joining the company, stressing that things were different this time after the adoption of the new principles, since preparations were not enough in the first time, especially that he faced a number of Senior officials from international companies without being ready for that, while the preparation of the last paper was clear and detailed, addressing each line and word, with the help of the initiators of the initiative, which means that there was an in-depth study of the working paper.

He pointed out that the preparation dealt with the smallest details and did not miss anything, for example the paper included the words "The Kuwait Oil Company was owned by the English and was acquired by the Kuwaitis," were this was changed because they were not correct and replaced by the words "KOC was put to Kuwaitization”. This means that nothing is left to chance. Every paper or study is directed at an audience of professors and senior executives. It is therefore necessary to select the words carefully, as instructed by the supervisors.

 

 

 

Abdul Razzaq Al-Khudair, from the Training and Career Development Group, who participated in the Milan conference, said that the initiative is very important. It helps the company impose its presence on others, many of whom come not to listen or discuss, but to sell their products. Their goal was different than KOC, where they often go beyond discussing the working paper, to raising questions outside of the subject related to other matters in the company that may be outside the speaker's competence.

Al Khudair said that this is a new challenge for the speakers and for him personally, as he is participating for the first time in the event outside of Kuwait after his previous experiences were limited to participating in the activities of the oil sector in Kuwait.

He explained that he presented a working paper on how to train engineers without entering the technical aspect of their work, pointing out that he talked about his membership in the Human Resources Strategy Committee 2030, one of the specialized committees of the oil sector, explaining the structure of training staff, whether technical or administrative.

He stressed that the experience was very good, hoping to be repeated, because the friction with others gives the experience and offers new ideas, and therefore KOC as a production and exploration company will benefit from other companies operating in several specializations in a greater global economic way.

 

 

 

The conclusion was with Abrar Al Belushi of the Exploration Working Group, which co-participated in presenting a study at the EAGE workshop in December 2016. The team was asked to prepare and submit a study, which she and her supervisor prepared and presented at the event.

Al-Belushi reported that she was the first to present a working paper in an event abroad, in an event usually attended by high-level experts with at least 25 years of experience, so she had to be confronted with explanations and answers to all their questions, and she managed to do that thanks to the initiative and the guidelines it provided.

In this context, she noted that during the preparation of the working paper, the mechanism required in the guidelines had been followed, explaining that, after its dispatch, it had been returned to them with some modifications and additions, and then sent again to receive them after a period with the approval of the Ministry of Oil without any change.

 

 

Salas Guzman explained how the Initiative works, saying that the conference is defined first and the extent of its benefit to the company. In the selection, the organizer will be contacted to discuss the topics that will be presented. It is then discussed with the group manager, which means that the subject is the key to selecting the specialized team which decides who they will send.