Human resources

Reducing Time to Autonomy for Technical Staff

This paper describes Royal Dutch Shell’s approach to developing the pipeline of technical professionals.

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Meeting increased production targets in the near future will require the recruitment and development of a large technical staff, made up of both recent graduates and experienced professionals. Shortening time to autonomy and integration is critical to success. This paper describes Royal Dutch Shell’s approach to developing this pipeline of technical professionals by outlining the conditions for success of the Shell Graduate Programme (SGP) and the Shell Advanced Technical Programme (SATP) and by discussing the approach to integrating experienced hires.

Context

Structured programs built around on-the-job development such as the SGP have achieved the development of recruited personnel and have ensured that autonomous staff are truly competent. The key strategic driver is faster time to autonomy, which is essential in the context of a shortage of capable technical staff. In this work, the term “time to autonomy” is used per the definition provided by Schlumberger Business Consultancy as the time it takes a new graduate employee from entry into the company until he/she can make nonstandard decisions autonomously.

The SGP

In 2011, the SGP was launched for technical professionals in all 29 technical disciplines in Shell. This was followed by similar programs for the commercial, human-resources, and legal skill pools.

The SGP is an integrated approach to accelerate graduates’ development up to the first level of autonomy in terms of performance and competence. The expected time to autonomy is on average 2 to 3 years, reduced from 4 to 5 years with the previous approach. The focus is on technical depth and broad business understanding.

Completion of the SGP has also been positioned as a prerequisite for consideration for internal job postings. Promotion occurs only when a graduate is successful and has been selected for a fully fledged technical professional job.

The principles of the SGP are as follows:

  • The program is owned by the global technical disciplines within Shell, as opposed to other corporate divisions. This is a critical success factor because the technical disciplines are tasked with setting and ensuring the competence of their staff. They can set and enforce global standards for graduate development within the discipline.
  • There is a focus on a small critical number of competencies (approximately 10). Reduction of competencies from often more than 25 to 10 or fewer has enabled greater focus and speed of development. Other competencies less critical for autonomy are developed over a longer period of time alongside participants’ primary work, mostly through self-study or online learning.
  • The program is tailored to individuals. Program content for individual graduates is determined by the difference between the competencies they already have upon joining Shell and the target levels for the critical competencies. This occurs through an intake conversation between the line manager and the individual. It is the distance between these two points that determines the program duration, and the job tasks (formal and informal) and online learning that a graduate will be required to complete during his or her SGP.
  • Competency development takes place on the job. The entire program is built around defined and assured job tasks, linked to one or more competencies per task.
  • Formal and online-learning support for job development is established.
  • Competencies are assured throughout and at the end of the program. Each competency is assured twice: once by direct observation of task performance, ideally as part of regular business control processes (e.g., value-assurance reviews); and then by a final competency assessment at the end of the SGP.
  • Each development step is tracked and reported to the global discipline heads, human-resources personnel, and business leadership. This keeps the focus on the program and allows intervention when needed. The goal is at any time to have at least 90% of graduates on track with an established mitigation plan.

The SGP commenced in 2011, and today there are approximately 2,000 graduates participating in the program. Feedback indicates that the structured approach enables graduates to go through their development much more quickly. Average on-track status of graduates in the program over the past 12 months was 93%. The structured approach, combining on-the-job learning with formal learning, has allowed the first batch of graduates to exit the program after 2 years.

Steps to Full Autonomy: The SATP

To decrease the time from basic autonomy to full autonomy, work is under way to build a generic framework with the technical disciplines to further develop their staff to full autonomy upon exit from the SGP. The SATP will follow the same principles as the SGP and will again be positioned as a prerequisite to compete for jobs at full-autonomy level. The overall program structure of the SATP will be designed around on-the-job learning supported by more formalized learning, coaching, and self-study.

In addition, the SATP will accomplish the following:

  • Use one generic framework that consists of an integrated solution in terms of job stretch, on-the-job development, formal learning, online learning, and coaching. This will guide the technical disciplines when building the discipline-specific frameworks.
  • Set high standards in terms of technical depth as well as business breadth (integration abilities), nontechnical competencies (e.g., economics, commercial, stakeholder management, and risk management), and the opportunity to reinforce Shell’s corporate culture and ethical standards.
  • Use external standards where possible (i.e., chartered engineers and geologists) to establish the correct competency standards (a strong preference toward “buying” over “building”).
  • Become a prerequisite for promotion into fully autonomous roles.
  • Have a duration of 2 years, making the complete time to autonomy from graduate entry into Shell an average of 5 to 6 years, which will be the best in the industry and up to 3 years faster than current practice (see Fig. 1).
  • Focus on technical professionals only rather than staff in nontechnical skill pools. 
  • As with the SGP, the SATP is owned and developed by the technical disciplines in Shell. The program will be built during 2012–13 and will be initiated with all applicable technical staff in the fourth quarter of 2013.
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Fig. 1—SGP and SATP key elements.

Experienced-Hire Integration

In recent years, in addition to integrating recent graduates, Shell has recruited a large number of experienced hires to meet our business targets and our external commitments. Historically, many experienced hires were not integrated into Shell and its corporate culture quickly enough because of a lack of structured solutions combining onboarding processes with technical and functional learning. As a result, it took too long for an experienced hire to fully achieve his/her potential. A lack of integration was also cited as a reason for the levels of attrition among experienced hires.

To reduce this time to autonomy, Shell implemented a structured onboarding and orientation solution to shorten the time to integration for experienced hires. This has been built by bringing together the best of a multitude of onboarding, welcoming, and briefing solutions for experienced hires. The new solution provides a single, comprehensive experienced-hire onboarding program that is easily accessible and is in place for all those joining the Shell Group (both technical and nontechnical personnel).

The strategic driver of this solution is to maximize the impact that experienced hires can have in the business by accelerating their integration into Shell. Providing both technical onboarding (i.e., closing skill gaps between experienced hires and their equivalent Shell peers) and functional onboarding (i.e., imparting Shell’s corporate culture and ethical standards), as well as creating a two-way dialogue enabling experienced hires to bring their expertise to Shell, is critical for successful integration of experienced recruits.

The new experienced-hire-integration platform is mandatory for all experienced joiners across Royal Dutch Shell to complete within the first 6 months of their joining the group. The program consists of two key streams.

Community Building and Key Knowledge Building. This stream is a modularized approach consisting of self-guided elements easily accessible through the internal Shell Wiki as a repository for “plug-and-play” content and of face-to-face interventions designed to enable community building and knowledge transfer between experienced hires and Shell staff.

Competence and Skills Focus. This dovetails with the SATP. Experienced hires with an appropriate experience range will join the SATP from the start, while more-senior experienced hires will follow a modular approach designed around skill gaps identified during the experienced-hire-intake process.

This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper IPTC 16394, “Accelerating Time to Autonomy for Technical Staff—Developing the Industry’s Best Performers,” by Michael Schaaf and Anu Garg-Buck, Royal Dutch Shell, prepared for the 2013 International Petroleum Technology Conference, Beijing, 26–28 March. The paper has not been peer reviewed. Copyright 2013 International Petroleum Technology Conference. Reproduced by permission.