The following are considered necessary: investments in digital technology and the human resources, in the field of oil and of gas, according to EY’s “Oil and Gas Digital Transformation and the Workforce Survey 2020.”.
Specifically, the 90% survey of executives in the oil and natural gas sector agree that investments in technology and human resources are essential for their organizations to survive in the market conditions shaped by the pandemic. COVID-19 while 58% of the respondents stated that the pandemic made investments in digital technology urgent, with the majority planning to invest a large (29%) or a moderate portion (51%) of their total budget on digital transformation initiatives.
According to the survey, the workforce at nearly half (46%) of the companies in the sector lacks the skills to implement the new technologies they are adopting. Organizations recognize a lack of maturity in skills related to digital technologies that are considered critical—on average, the gap between the importance of the technology and the level of maturity of the corresponding skills ranges at 36%. For example, 43% of executives reported the the growing availability of big data and information, as one of the top three trends that will positively influence their company’s business growth over the next three years. However, the gap between the strategic importance of data analytics and the maturity of core data analysis skills was one of the largest in the survey, reaching 59%.
92% of respondents agree that their organization’s ability to retrain its executives will determine its success over the next three years. However, according to the EY survey, only 9% of executives say they are confident that their organization is implementing a detailed retraining plan, and just 3% are confident that their organization is adequately training staff in high-demand skills.
In response to a question regarding their organization’s current workforce, the respondents stated that 60% of the employees need to be trained or retrained and that The average worker will need an average of 10 months of retraining, with nearly half of the executives (48%) expecting that it will take a year or more. Respondents ranked the time required for training (97%), conflicting priorities (95%), and the difficulty of assessing employee progress (95%) as the primary obstacles to effective and timely workforce retraining. Furthermore, two-thirds of the executives who participated in the survey expressed the belief that Their organizational structure hinders their ability to innovate, making it more difficult to address the above issues, as well as other challenges.
According to the survey, executives in the oil and natural gas industry predict increased availability of workers with digital skills within the next three years, which will help to addressing the current shortage of skills and specialized personnel. The percentage of companies that have sufficient access to employees with cloud computing skills is expected to improve by 11 percentage points compared to current availability, along with digital literacy (+18), data science (data science, +26), and artificial intelligence (AI, +24).
