Probably not that far — as we wouldn’t have gas for our cars and motorcycles.
And while alternative energy sources are all well and good, the fact is that for the last century and more, we have been relying on petroleum for the overwhelming majority of our transportation. Besides, petroleum companies were among the first to research and help bring alternative energy sources to market, too.
It’s not just about gasoline either — petroleum is also extremely important for many other industries, as the raw material for plastics, pharmaceuticals, solvents, fertilizers, and pesticides. We’d hardly have an industrial revolution without it.
It’s also a huge industry. One that is divided into several segments that are also huge themselves: the so-called upstream, midstream and downstream petroleum industry – concerned with the exploration and production of crude oil (upstream), transportation and storage of oil and refined products (midstream), and selling to retailers and consumers (downstream).
It’s an industry that employs millions of people at all technical levels, from dedicated petroleum scientists to gas pump operators, and where a single company can have thousands of facilities to manage, and very complicated logistics.
eLearning with a leading LMS/TDS like eFront can fuel (pun intended) a scalable, cost effective, and flexible employee training and talent development solution for the multi-faceted training demands of the petroleum industry.
Petroleum industry employee orientation
Depending on the sector and seasonality of the work involved, employee turnover and the need to train new hires can be a real issue in the petroleum industry.
Especially at the upstream and midstream segment of the industry, when the discovery of a new production site or the opening of a new delivery pipeline can necessitate the hiring of thousands of new employees, most (especially at the lower skill levels) without prior experience for their job position.
Automating employee orientation with a Learning and Talent Development platform like eFront lets managers scale employee onboarding on demand, without the traditional delays and overheads associated with in-person on-boarding courses.
eFront helps you introduce your new hires to their working environment and give them the information they need to start being productive. This includes all the complex state regulated compliance training that you need to perform, as well as the details about your company’s operating procedures, policies and guidelines.
Creating your orientation material using eFront couldn’t be easier. You can use the content creation tools to create new and original material (from simple text to interactive quizzes), and then add any existing content you have, such as Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, video, audio, images, PDFs, and even online content, like YouTube videos and Wikipedia articles.
Thanks to our proprietary EncodeMagic engine, eFront will even automatically convert any external file you add to it so that it’s ready and compatible for online consumption.
Employee Training
An industry with such diverse facilities, roles and scale, also has very demanding and rigid employee training needs.
Fortunately, eFront has been built to be flexible enough to handle all kinds of organizational hierarchies and training scenarios, while being intuitive enough to have content creators, instructors and learners be able to be immediately productive when using it.
Don’t just take our word, either: eFront has won several industry awards, and is in use by some of the most demanding enterprises and organizations — in addition to being a certified IBM Partner for its IBM Connections platform.
The Petroleum industry is yet another place where eFront can shine.
The Petroleum industry is yet another place where eFront can shine.Share on
The flexibility starts at the deployment stage: if you want to manage your own private installation on your own servers, you can. Or you can opt for eFront’s Private Cloud hosting, enjoying the benefits of a Cloud service (zero installation and configuration overhead, automatic backups, etc) with the assurance that you’re the only occupant of your Cloud (no resource sharing, privacy, etc.).
And for managing and organizing employee training for all kinds of different facilities and job positions, eFront offers tools like Branches (the ability to have a centrally-managed, but totally independent, customized and branded training portal per department or facility), Groups, Skills and User Types (for dividing your learners in different groups and tagging them with the appropriate information about their skills and job functions), Categories, Mass Actions, and lots of other organizational tools that give you total control of how you structure your training program.
An inherent advantage of online learning, and especially easy to achieve in eFront, is the ability for your employees to complete their training at their own pace, which helps minimize disruptions to their regular workflows.
Of course, the Petroleum industry also has lots of training that has to be done on-site and in-person (e.g. to showcase the manual operation of some particular piece of equipment).
eFront can help you handle that too, through its support for so-called instructor-led training (ILT), also known as “blended learning”. With eFront’s built-in ILT support, you can manage your real-time training sessions (whether in a classroom setting or through teleconference) just like you would your regular online lessons.
Finally, eFront’s reporting tools give you total insight, quantifiable information and detailed statistics on your employees’ attendance and progress, letting you zoom-out for a high level view, or zoom-in to see what’s the case for any particular employee or group of employees.
Knowledge retention
With increased employee turnover in many sectors of the Petroleum industry, employees often come and go, taking valuable operational intelligence with them.
It could be a certain regional manager who knows all about how to handle some specific large clients, or the peculiarities of state regulation in his area, or some factory worker who found a more productive way to go through their daily workflow.
eFront can help you capture this knowledge in your Learning and Talent Development content in a formalized and easily accessible way, allowing you to re-use it as part of your regular training curriculum to train employees across all your facilities.
Compliance Training
The Petroleum industry is among the kings of state regulated compliance training demands.
Thankfully, eFront can help you implement compliance training, thanks to its built-in support for Certifications.
You get the option to award a certificate upon the completion of any compliance course (or course curriculum), and you can configure automatic expiration of certificates to handle cases where the state law or company policy asks for periodic re-education and re-testing. Plus, for cases where someone is fired or messes up, you can automatically revoke their certificate from within eFront.
Last, but not least, as certificates can also be rendered and printed as PDF documents, you can can also design your own certificates to fit your company branding.
eFront makes Petroleum industry training a gas
Take eFront for a test drive today, and see for yourself how eLearning can help boost your employees’ skills and improve the productivity of your business, as it has for thousands of businesses and organizations all over the globe.
