The majority of oil and gas executives in the Middle East anticipate a looming talent shortage in all skill categories, the most pressing of which is in operations (81 per cent), said a report.

Experts focused on the oil and gas sector to gauge the talent trends in the growing industry in a report entitled the Talent Edge 2020: Redrafting talent strategies for the uneven recovery by Deloitte, a leading professional services firm.

The Deloitte report is based on the responses of 376 executives, 34 per cent of which from Europe, Middle East and Africa, outlining key talent-related challenges across industries. Findings indicate that critical talent shortages, retention programs, and the growing reliance on discovering global talent are top concerns for oil and gas executives.

“We are witnessing a growing trend of oil and gas companies expanding into global and new markets as a top strategic priority. Moreover, talent management is no longer confined to the company’s country of operation; rather the search has gone global, to find skilled and critical talent,” said Ghassan Turqieh, Human Capital consulting partner at Deloitte in the Middle East.

Surveyed oil and gas executives ranked finding the right people globally as their top talent priority, citing managing human capital (38 per cent) and expanding into global and new markets (38 per cent) as their companies’ most important strategic concerns.

Executives find that a looming talent shortage in all skill categories exists in many fields, which include operations (81 per cent), IT (61 per cent), risk and regulatory (62 per cent), and research and development (60 per cent), the report said.

Surveyed oil and gas executives worry more about retention than leaders in other sectors, even though they see their retention programs as equally strong. Around 28 per cent of the oil and gas respondents were very confident in the effectiveness of their retention strategies and programs, similar to the proportion in other sectors. Yet 38 per cent of oil and gas respondents expressed a very high level of concern about retaining critical talent over the next year, versus just 25 per cent in the other sectors.

Surveyed oil and gas executives put a high priority on finding scarce skills and managing global talent. Talent concerns that attract “the most management attention” in the oil and gas sector include recruiting hard-to-find skill sets (38 per cent versus 28 per cent in other sectors), competing for talent globally and in emerging markets (30 per cent versus 22 per cent), and deploying critical talent around the world (28 per cent versus 15 per cent), the report said.

Global talent mobility will likely continue to rise in importance. 32 per cent of surveyed oil and gas executives believed that, in three years, deploying critical talent around the world will be even more of a top concern than it is today, according to the report.

Many surveyed executives anticipate seeing across-the-board talent shortages over the course of 2012, and are developing plans to meet the challenge. The Deloitte report finds that critical talent shortages will continue in the coming years, becoming more of a top concern for executives, than it is today. – TradeArabia News Service