Gulf Coast Section ELP: Emerging Engineers Conference

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The Gulf Coast Section’s Emerging Leaders Program (ELP) held the first Emerging Engineers Conference (EEC) at the Marathon Oil Conference Center in Houston in May. The agenda focused on career management, interpersonal skills, and engineering topics and hosted a dynamic lineup of speakers, presenters, and discussion leaders for an audience of 41 attendees. The event was led by ELP member Anissa Berridge of Apache Corp. and was supported by sponsorship from Anadarko Petroleum Corp., Apache Corp., Marathon Oil Corp., and Collarini & Assocs.

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William M. Griffin of El Paso Production Co. opened the conference with a talk titled “Lessons Learned—Career Guidance in a Growth Environment.” Griffin discussed the importance of integrity, work ethic, attitude, interpersonal skills, and competency as they relate to young professionals in the industry. Further insight was provided on the topic of skills in career development by George King of BP and Todd Montgomery of Anadarko Petroleum, who made presentations illustrating specific skill sets and attributes for young engineers looking for career advancement opportunities. The conference concluded with an address from B.P. Huddleston of Huddleston & Co. Inc. With almost 50 years of experience in the oil and gas industry, Huddleston provided his insights on industry trends that are affecting the young workforce.

The EEC Interpersonal Skills Sessions featured Bridget Mueller of the U. of Houston in a talk titled “Attitude vs. Aptitude: Primed for Promotion” and Walt Palen of BP on the topic of “Knowledge Management.” Both talks centered on paying greater attention to soft skills such as nonverbal communication as they affect the image portrayed by a young professional.

Technical engineering topics included a technical skills session on post-stack seismic reservoir characterization by David Paddock of Schlumberger and engineering team exercises on the topics of business-development and reserves determination. Bill Jentsch of JLSJ Enterprises Inc. led a business development exercise, in which attendees explored the process of evaluating and selling a key asset. Ray Block of Apache led the reserves-determination exercise, which included a data room technical evaluation of the prospect.

Participants discussed soft skills and industry issues.

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