Tapping into Shale Talent
When it comes to developing shale gas in Poland, it’s not only about the gas in place, according to Jakub Zlamaniec, Managing Partner at Energy Jobs CEE.
Representing an HR enterprise that provides human capital specifically to E&Ps in Poland, he offered an exclusive interview to Natural Gas for Europe at the European Unconventional Gas Summit Paris 2011 on the importance of finding the best human resources to complete the job.
Zlamaniec said making shale gas happen is not the just money, technology, rigs and concessions - it’s also the professionals you can you put on the ground.
He recalled how his company got into the business of helping energy companies with non-technical but labor intensive services.
“On the human resource side, building competencies in shale gas in Poland is very important. It’s a very technical business. We need people who know what they’re doing, who have specific job qualifications, certifications and building that talent pool in the country is a huge challenge and a huge business opportunity,” he said.
Zlamaniec explained that there had been two rounds of shale gas concession allocations in Poland in the last couple of years, explaining the emerging need for the right people.
“The ones that have been awarded to date are exploration concessions which are issued for 3-4 years that obligate companies to drill two wells per concession and share all their data with the Polish geologic authorities. Definitely the most prominent events of the last couple of months have been two oil and gas E&Ps doing test wells,” he said.
According to him, all E&Ps, both big and small, were extensively hiring people for non specialized positions, especially engineers and people with good track records, and sometimes it was a matter of getting people to come home.
He said: “Poland has produced a lot of very good engineers, petroleum people working worldwide, although there has been no petroleum or gas business on any major scale in Poland for the last 40-50 years. Poland was actually one of the biggest natural gas producers a very long time ago, so there is a tradition for drilling for it and other natural resources in Poland which hasn’t been done in a long time.”
Now with the technology in place to utilize unconventional resources, said Zlamaniec, his company was seeing some interest in Poles coming back into the country.
“They are old and young people working in places as diversified as Norway, the US, UK, Australia and the Far East. Part of our job is not only to build the talent pool, but then we’re going to work with universities and vocational schools. Certainly there will be partnerships in the future with schools abroad and Polish schools, but even now we have some Polish talent who can do the job. Our job is to attract them and bring them here,” he explained.
Zlamaniec said attracting talent to Poland’s shale plays was also a labor intense, non technical business.
“Particularly scouting the permitting and land management services, so securing rights for having these oil and gas companies make their way into the field and getting their seismic equipment and getting their equipment on the land. There’s an incredibly amount of paperwork associated with this,” he said, continuing: “Poland does not have any experience in helping corporations, making their lives easier. Definitely there is no ‘one window approach’ as there is in Canada; there’s a 50-window approach.”
He added that the plot sizes of land concessions were also much much smaller. “So there’s less economic incentive because there are no royalties going directly to landowners. So on the service side of our work I see that we have our work cut out for us and in terms of recruitment there are just a lot of people needed, both expats and Poles alike."
Zlamaniec said one of the advantages of hiring his firm was that it specialized in the oil and gas industry and was focused on the shale gas plays. “We’re experts in our space,” he contended.
“All of our partners have extensive track records in hiring people for multinationals, but what really is a major issue is we’re not order takers - we’re salespeople with an entrepreneurial spirit so we will sell the best candidates on working for you. For every geologist or drill supervisor or agency directory or regulatory affairs person, there are 3-7 great job opportunities and our job is to sell these people on you, to vet them, to make sure that they will be personal, safe, capable, dependable people.
“We do a lot of background checking, investigation into whether this person will be the person they promise to be, so I think we know the space and are very happy to talk about it with anyone who wants to understand the Polish shale gas landscape and how human resources are some of the resources that should be take into the mix,” he said.
He said Energy Jobs CEE was looking to fill a variety of positions. “The most important categories are people in charge of land, the more non-technical positions; drilling supervisors; health and safety people; and on the sort of in house side, regulatory and government affairs people.”
“We know the oil and gas community very well – we know the key players, the employers, and schools,” he said. “So taking into account both the alumni associations, major employers, major plays in both the conventionals and unconventionals world, and adding a bit of our magic touch we can source basically anybody needed into the new Polish shale gas industry.”
Energy Jobs CEE hopes to have locked up 150-200 contract positions by summertime.
“Oil and gas companies, especially the big ones are very averse to putting people on the payroll, increasing their headcounts. The smaller ones are the same, but for different reasons,” said Zlamaniec. “First of all, we do some hiring directly into oil and gas E&Ps, but most of the headcount is into our own special purpose vehicles from which we contract people to our customers and provide them with some additional services including payroll, employee management/handling, relocations services, etc.”
He continued: “These companies are very savvy and used to getting a certain level of service provided to them worldwide and we’re trying to learn from them and not only emulate our competitors but, because we are definitely newcomers to the game with about two years of experience, we’re able to be innovative and provide more responsive solutions than the embedded guys.”
Zlamaniec emphasized the personal side to recruiting for the unconventionals sector in Poland.
“We need to have a lot of empathy to understand their needs and walk in their shoes,” he explained of candidates. “There are a lot of individuals and everybody has a different reason for what they do. People say to us ‘We’ll come back to Poland if you can promise that there really is a shale gas business.’ Now of course we can’t promise that Poland will have full shale gas production; only the big E&Ps possibly know, or not.
“What we can say is,” he continued, “we are banking on the fact that Poland will have at least 5-10 years of phenomenal growth in the service operator and E&P operator industry. These companies will be doing a lot of business and working very hard for the next 5-10 years. People who are abroad, Poles as well, are used to 3-5 year cycles; they don’t expect to be in one place for 20 or 30 years, so what we can say is that we believe if you come to Poland you’ll work for five years at least in a very satisfactory capacity.”
Zlamaniec said that his professionals were hearing about many Poles returning to their roots for the opportunity.
“People are sold that they can come back to the country of their youth and render a profession that they have been educated in, usually both in Poland and abroad, into building a new industry, a new marketplace in Poland, helping the country from both political and social points of view, because they’re helping us create a new level of energy independence.”
The prospects for shale gas in his country, he explained, had taken Poland by surprise.
“Nobody in Poland knew that we might have the potential to create tens of thousands of jobs, hundreds of millions of dollars in the first years and then billions as we get up to production.”
He added Poland was well placed to take advantage of the situation.
“We’re the only country in the EU that had some GDP growth in the last couple of years,” Zlamaniec explained. “Our EU funding is ending, so if we get a new funding source, an exciting new way of financing our growth, and that would be shale gas, that would be fantastic.”