The Journey of Uplifting: First Ever Petroleum Development Oman Corporate Digital Competency Development Program
Authors: AL-Riyami Hilal Mudhafar , Al Subhi Hamed Ali 
Published: December 2021

With capability training becoming ever important, our Pilot in-house developed and run program during COVID-19 delivered a comprehensive digital learning ecosystem which enabled participants to develop their digital skills and competencies. The digital learning journey empowered Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) staff to become ambassadors working in collaboration to enable their department digital plans. Building on international best practices, uplifting our engineers to become data scientists will drive direct business value in an efficient decentralized manner and cater for the ever-growing demand for digital transformation.

As PDO embarks into the digital world, the program offered participants customized learning paths enabling them to utilize technology to optimize their daily operations, increase efficiency and effectiveness. Also the program enabled staff to get hands-on exposure to digital projects and what other companies in the sector add a practicing in the space of digital transformation.

Hence, participants have built the required digital muscle and competencies to drive PDO digital agenda and bring value to the business. With the vision of promoting and pioneering our talent and organization as future ready, the program played a vital role in reshaping PDO's image in coping with the Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VOCA) working environment.

The program started as a pilot project covering a specific number of PDO staff to build their digital competencies and experiment with various learning paths and tools. Also, the program focused on on-boarding their managers into the program to fully understand the added value of launching a 19 week program with diverse approaches to build their staff's skills. Moreover, one of the key goals of the pilot project is to test various mentorship and coaching approaches to ensure higher completion rates from all participants and cater for their technical challenges.

As PDO working towards corporate digital strategy, the program is paving the way to build a robust training and competency framework, a task force capable of driving change and forward looking plans. With the successful results of the pilot, replication of the methodology and maturing the program is now being taken by PDO Information technology department to corporately build digital muscle within PDO value chain. As a result of participants' first pilot project and implementation posts evaluation assessment, the management endorsed the launch of cohort 2 for the program tackling a bigger number of staff and expanding the range of competencies to tackle in the areas of data science, machine learning and personal intelligence.

One of the key learnings which was implemented in cohort 2, is building a comprehensive stakeholder map and alignment plans to ensure the right path of corporate scale beyond and benefit a bigger audience within the corporate. For example, multiple workshops and engagement sessions have been done with PDO Learning Academy and technical coaches in different departments to match the outcomes from cohort 2 and the aspiration of PDO building digital competency framework.

In addition, PDO digital competency development program has aspired to build an ecosystem within the organization and in collaboration with external stakeholders like universities, e-learning platforms and technical partners to ensure sustainability of such initiatives and their scalability beyond PDO. The program sparked many conversations within the ecosystem to build collaborative teams and joint task force to investigate how we can build digital competencies for our staff and as well for startups to encourage growth from various aspects.