| Background
Addept were commissioned to redevelop the Technical and Professional Learning Portal for a multi-national organisation within the oil & gas sector. The portal was designed to provide staff, working anywhere in the world, with a single access point to the entire organisation’s training and development needs across a range of different disciplines. For each discipline, a career progression map is defined consisting of 4 levels of competency: Basic Awareness, Basic Application, Skilful Application and Mastery/Expert. Each discipline also has a number of skills defined against it. The training courses and development aids are then allocated to the intersection of the skill and the competency level. Course types are colour coded to make the progression maps easier to read and understand. Using web technologies to host the application was of vital importance, as it gave all of the organisations E&P employees working in over 25 different countries, direct access to the site from their desktops or laptops, without having to download any software. The whole system has been designed to make it as easy as possible for the user to access and utilise the system without any prior training. By clicking on a course, a prospective student can see details of the course, who is running the course and the scheduled dates and locations. Both internal and external training courses are supported. A user requests to join a course by clicking on the “Join” button and completing a simple web form. Integration with the organisation’s implementation of Addept Connect provides automated authentication of the user, so that most of this course booking form is pre-populated with their personal details. The system then generates an email and sends it off to the course provider. This enables people to request a place(s) on a course quickly and easily, once they have approval from their manager. The unique Approval Number sent as part of the booking information enables the organisation to manage the assignment of training invoices to the delegates cost centre. Calendar and Search
In addition to the Progression Maps, staff can use either a Global Calendar, showing the available sessions each month, or an inbuilt search facility. The search tool provides a text searching capability and enables people to access courses across all the different disciplines. News
The Home page for the site also hosts a News section, which is used to notify users of new courses, disciplines or training arrangements, as well as any other relevant news items. The news itself is easily updated by the administrators without any requirement for specific technical knowledge. Phase II
Having implemented Phase I of the project, Addept were then asked to carry out Phase II. This phase was mainly concerned with improving the administration areas of the site and providing a range of web based usage reports.
These reports include: showing who has booked which courses during the year, which courses do not currently have any sessions available and the attendance levels on the different courses at different locations around the world. All the reports provide the facility for the data to be downloaded in to Excel for further analysis and charting. For the users, a new facility was provided to allow them to register an “Expression of Interest” in a course. This facility can be used to register an interest in attending a course when there are no scheduled instances of the course available. Phase III
The most recent phase provides the facility to send out enquiries to the course providers for attendee lists and delegate feedback. This information can then be fed back into the system. Reports show, who was interested in a course, who booked through the portal, who attended and who booked independently of the portal. This enables a comprehensive review of the system’s usage. Feedback on the courses can now be displayed along with the course information and can be used in the evaluation of the different courses and courses providers.
The “Expression of Interest” facility has also been upgraded to alert the course providers once a certain number of people have expressed an interest. This alert mechanism can also be used to highlight the demand for a course in a specific geographical region, so that courses can be run in a particular region when the demand for the course justifies it. Usage
From relatively humble beginnings, usage of this Technical and Professional Learning Portal has grown beyond all expectations. It is used by people across the organisation, not just by E&P staff. The system now handles the learning and development needs for 12 separate disciplines, encompassing some 70 different skills and providing access to over 390 courses. Over 10,000 people have used the system with 100 new users joining every month.
The Future
At the moment, while an audit trail is maintained as to who has booked on which course, the system does not generally recommend particular courses to individuals. A Portal Awareness project is being undertaken on a pilot basis. This promotes individual courses to people based on their competency level, previous courses completed and location. The aim of this pilot is to gauge how people respond to the system recommending the next step in their learning and development progression. Disciplines supported: Commercial Drilling & Completions Engineer of the Future Gas & Power Geoscience Health, Safety and Environment Operations Management Petroleum Engineering Petrophysics Procurement - Supply Chain Management Project Management Reservoir Engineering
The Benefits
The organisation is very keen to actively invest in their people. Ensuring their staff are given the training and development opportunities that will enable them to make the most of their capabilities. Not only does the Technical & Professional Learning Portal provide global access to relevant development and training, it does so in a consistent and easy to use manner. The popularity of the site and its expansion outside of its original user base is a testament to its good design, usability and scalability. | 
