My Job

I haven't written much about my job. It's complicated and I have been thinking about how to succinctly describe what I do.

I am a direct hire of a new administrative unit in Aramco called UPDC, Upstream Professional Development Center. We are within the Exploration Division, the other large division in the company being Production, of course. Upstream refers to all of the activities that take place up to the point that hydrocarbons enter a processing facility. Upstream does include production but the Production Division is more concerned with all of the processing, manufacturing, and transport of products than in getting hydrocarbons out of the ground. It's a somewhat artificial division in a fully integrated, national oil company like Aramco.

UPDC was created to build an industrial training program for all upstream technical professionals: drilling engineers, production engineers, reservoir engineers, petrophysicists, geologists, geophysicists, and facilities engineers. In the past, training was managed separately by each group. There was a lot of overlap, gaps, and inefficiencies. Getting all of those groups to agree on shared training objectives is a gigantic pain in the ass and fortunately I don't have to worry about that.

My job role is SME, Subject Matter Expert (my job title is Geologist I). I am responsible for working with representatives from the line organizations (mainly the various exploration and reservoir characterization geological groups) to help determine what training they want new hires to have and what courses could be built or bought to provide that training.

The new hires are specifically young Saudis who were selected when they were in high school to be PDPs. Those who are smart or whose families are royal or well connected are sent to universities in the US, UK, Europe, or Australia. Others are sent to one of the two KSA universities. They get bachelor's degrees in geology and return to KSA with a guaranteed job with Aramco. They need quite a lot of training to prepare them for their jobs--although this is a bit of a paradox since they could actually do fuck-all for their entire career and never get fired. One of our tasks besides training them is get them excited about actually performing their job duties, and to want to excel in their jobs.

UPDC has some particular requirements for its training courses--no "death by Powerpoint" or droning, hours-long brain dumps by experts. Courses have to be more than 50% activity or exercise based. All exercises have to use Aramco/KSA data. Sounds simple but that means that most commercial courses have to be Aramco-ized before delivery. And nearly all experts in and out of Aramco are used to the old school way of doing it: stand up and lecture for three or four days straight, then have them look at some data.

For the past several months I have been building the Geology Flagship, a two-week course that is the first technical course the PDPs will receive in their training program. I have literally been building this course from the ground up. It has been an immensely consuming effort. Some content I researched and wrote myself. For other modules, I got content from experts in Aramco and rewrote and built exercises for. And for yet other modules, I had experts build their own damned exercises. (Can you tell I'm getting tired of building exercises?) I will deliver most of the two weeks of material (starting May 8) but for some specialized modules, those carefully selected experts will deliver their own stuff.

For me to learn Saudi Arabian geology and find useful, willing experts throughout the company in only five months has been a tremendous effort. And this is just ONE course out of about 10 that need to be developed in the next few months. Thankfully, I only need to help build a couple of them and oversee the building of the rest.

With constant evergreening of courses and development of new ones as needed, there is work here to keep me busy for years.