I try to invest one or two weeks each year in extending my skill set. Partly because I like learning new stuff, but mainly because I am a consultant/contractor and my skill set is my product/service.
Last week I did an Oil and Gas industry fundamentals course at the Energy Institute in Lndn. This covered the full stream from geology and exploration to refining and trading and hedging. Details here. This is a great course, and a great way to fill in the knowledge gaps. What I especially liked was the mixed formats, with lectures, quiz, team discussions, videos. I was really impressed with the delivery. Of course it helps the presenter had a few decades experience across seemingly the whole industry, and a keen interest in recent developments.
The current oil price excitement adds a good backdrop, and helps focus the interest. Brent.
We covered such things as
- the different products, crude oil, Gas, LNG, refined products
- The geology, and seismic investigation techniques (I used to work on a seismic survey team many moons ago)(not as good as the job I had in a biscuit factory – but a close second – when it wasn’t raining)
- Enhanced recovery techniques
- Unconventional sources (topical with current shale gas interest)
- Environmental and safety, security, sustainability issues
- Carbon capture and sequestration
- Transportation techniques
- Refinery processes and economics.
- Trading physical and hedging strategies
- Road fuel and bio fuels
- Alternative energy sources
- fuel switching issues
Overall it was a excellent course, with a vast array of content. As such it was really only scratching the surface across the breadth of the industry. There look to be follow on course in many of the sub areas so you should be able to find one to match your specific area of interest. (I have a few in my gun sights – time permitting)
If you are interested in this critical industry and have 3 days to invest, I would highly recommend this course. Interestingly one of the delegates mentioned she had been advised that the Energy Institute course was much better than the others. (I didn’t even find any others, so couldn’t compare.)
A few weeks ago I did a commodity derivatives course with bpp. here are the details. The presenters and the course content were very good. Lots of useful stuff, highly targeted to the CISI certificate exams, which are luckily very relevant to the real world of trading. Another one I would recommend – it was 2.5 days on derivatives, 2 on regulations – you could probably skip the regs unless you need the certificate.
Are you doing any business training? Any technical training? Any training at all?
Cheers
Simon
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