RL Blogs
By Dr. Suresh S Agrawal of Offsite Management Systems LLC
Jan 17, 2016Discussing various types of refiner training options available for continuing education. |
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Introduction
Continuing education or employee training is an option that any employer cannot and should not ignore both short term and long term impact on the work force development. In an era of downward spiraling oil price, experienced staff either retire, or are involuntarily pushed out to save man-power cost and replaced with relatively fresh and inexperienced graduates.
The problem is although new hires are technologically current and bring a fresh air but lack over-all perspective for the business processes. Typically, it takes 3-4 years before the business can reap benefits from fresh hires.
This period may be longer if the business does not have a comprehensive training program in place to develop its work force. Hence, it is important to develop a strategic training program to develop skills for new and old work force alike.
It is not a disputed fact that time and money spent in the development of work force has a quick payback period.
In this article, we will discuss various types of training options available in the market place, their advantages, costs and economics. In the end, we will also discuss what and how does our company, Offsite Management Systems LLC (OMS), offers training and webinars for the development of professionals working in the refinery offsite operations.
Training Options
1. Classroom Offsite Public Training - These are courses offered publicly by training institutions, industry experts, DCS vendors and system integrators on topics related to oil and gas industry. The pros and cons of this options are as follows:
2. Classroom On-site Private Training - At times it becomes prohibitive for a company to send their employees to an offsite public course due to time and budget constraints, inadequate quality of course contents and not available just when needed, etc.
Another option to eliminate or minimize these cons of the publicly offered courses is to select and invite the industry recognized instructor to teach the course at company's promise on selected schedule. However, this approach also has its own following pros and cons.
3. Interactive Computer Training - This category of training can include all computer based courses with or without internet connection and are usually referred to as Computer Based Training (CBT), Blended Learning, Interactive learning etc.
This type of training is for most parts specifically focused to either a software or a business process. Blending learning usually comprises of two parts, Performance support using SharePoint portal and eLearning which is interactive and comprises of quizzes, tests and certification steps.
OMS has managed a blended learning project for Shell oil products for Invensys’ (Now Schneider) Oil Movement Management (OMM) and Tanks Information System (TIS) which contained Share point Portal for performance Support and eLearning for interactive training and certification Portal for planner, operator and yield accountant. Click here for its project profile.
4. Self-study Training - Almost all in-person training have training manuals which includes all slides or presentations delivered by the instructor classroom and the learner can take them home as part of course fee for later reference purpose. However, some instructors make these manuals available online for purchase and download. This manual can be used for self-paced study as and when required and annotate notes for follow-ups later. Sometimes, instructors also offer Q&A and clarifications by emails.
Economics
Just to complete the story, I used average industry data for the cost of attending training by all of the options discussed in this paper. The basic assumption was an average class size of 15 and average expenses for travel, lodging, boarding, local transportation and incidentals, all collected from the author's personal experience and offerings.
We can see from the chart below that break-even point for onsite training is about 5 students to be economical over off-site training courses. Other modes of non-classroom learning, as expected, have lower cost per student than classroom learning mode.
Strategic Training Curriculum for Refinery Offsite Operations
OMS Classroom Training Courses - OMS has developed and offers offsite and onsite strategic training curriculum in a series of three courses, recommended to attend in sequence over a period of 6-12 months to develop new skills for professional working in the refinery offsite operations such as crude and fuels blending, oil movement, tank farm and linear / non-linear programming applications.
Each of the course in series focuses individually on 1-Management, 2-Control and 3-Optimization of refinery offsite operations. The following courses are offered publicly around the world in alliance with various training institutions or by OMS themselves. Please click on each course title below to view its agenda, schedule and who should attend and also to register for next upcoming course.
OMS Online Webinars - OMS has conducted following online webinars on topics of interests to professionals working in the refinery offsite operations. These webinars can be viewed online or downloaded with audio-video slides. Please click here to explore past OMS webinars or view next upcoming webinar.
OMS Self-Study Training Manuals - OMS training courses manuals accessed here and webinar audio/video with webinars slides can be downloaded here.
in international publications and conferences in the areas of refinery offsite operations automation. He has also acted as a consultant to a number of refining and process industries worldwide, and delivers training seminars in the areas of his expertise. | ||
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