Identifying Critical Skills for the Future

Summary With an ever growing emphasis on Sustainability, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) continuously evaluates various aspects of operation to ensure our ability to navigate market dynamics. Over the last several years, our talent management practices have come under deep focus, and the transitions we have made has impacted the way we hire, retain and progress our people. The discipline approach to managing talent has provided far reaching insights into the capabilities we have and the depth to which we can invoke these capabilities. In 2023, we embarked on yet another important transition – to identify and develop the Future Skills that we will require as we optimize our net zero journey. Given the shift towards digitalization, automation and integration of renewable energy, we are prioritizing upskilling future generations to keep ADNOC front and center of our industry. We undertook this exercise in several phases, with the collaboration of our business leads and a Human Capital joint task Force. At its culmination, crucial data has been passed on to our businesses as well as key Human Capital functions for execution and alignment. This project was divided into the following main stages: Benchmarking with global experts. Collating information through discussions, workshops and identifying a set of skills in areas e.g. Digitalization & Asset ManagementValidating skills with ADNOC Business Leaders and Experts. Creating, sanitizing and customizing skills and their definitions to create fit for purpose Future Skills.Existing Bench Strength. Identifying bench strength of all identified future skills through in-depth focus groups with Business Leaders and Experts to determine Build, Borrow, Buy strategies.Validating Future Skills. Conduct a group wide exercise to assess capability by deploying job specific future skill requirements, as well as mining data through self-declared skills.Integration with Workforce Planning, Talent Acquisition and other Human Capital Partners. To distill strategies to become part of the 5 year Business Plan (Build, Borrow, Buy). The paper will deconstruct the process and also put forward the impact of this project and the steps that we undertook to deliver concise and usable output.