It has often been said that "Technical skills get you hired, and soft skills get you promoted." Whether they are called "soft skills," "nontechnical skills," or "professional skills," the incorporation of soft skills into the development of technical professionals is evolving and becoming more critical to both employers and technical professionals. Because of the "Big Crew Change," new supervisors and technical leaders will take on new responsibilities, which will require them to rely upon their soft skills. Ensuring that soft skills training is embedded with technical training prepares future leaders. The quality of the technical contribution increases when individuals work more collaboratively. Soft skills help to improve personal effectiveness, providing a vehicle with which to deliver business results. Soft skills enhance expected business outcomes of the technical professional's work product. A variety of methods are utilized in professional development to disseminate best practices in soft skills to technical professionals. In addition to SPE, several other professional and technical societies are placing an increasing emphasis on soft skills development. There are several ways to measure the impact, both qualitatively and quantitatively, of incorporating soft skills into professional development for engineers. One way of measuring the impact includes surveying participants and their supervisors according to Kirkpatrick's levels of evaluation. It is challenging to incorporate soft skills development into existing rigorous engineering degree curricula or corporate onboarding programs without sacrificing the emphasis on development of technical competency. Increasingly, it is becoming more apparent that the value of the effort to incorporate soft skills, pays off in multiple ways to both the corporation in achieving their strategic objectives and to the working professional in realizing their career development goals. Common themes from case studies, surveys and benchmarking with other professional technical societies will illustrate how to deliver better business outcomes with soft skills.

Professionals in mid- to late-career stages who are considered part of the Baby Boomer generation are leaving the workforce while an even larger demographic, Millennials, are entering the workforce. The pace of the transition has resulted in many companies losing massive amounts of knowledge and struggling to operate at the same performance levels with a less experienced workforce. The scope of this paper is to highlight one company's approach to address the challenge of effective knowledge management and transfer. In this case study, company leaders recognized the workforce transition in the mid-2000s and developed a strategy to manage and retain explicit and tacit knowledge from the experienced retiring workforce. A critical factor was to identify principle in-house subject matter experts (SMEs) and capture their knowledge. The next major step was to package the knowledge into assets from which the next generation could best learn. This paper discusses how the strategy, its implementation, and the evaluation of outcomes was critical to the success of this knowledge transfer initiative. In 2010, an important component of the knowledge transfer initiative was the opening of a state-of-the-art training facility, the Upstream Professional Development Center (UPDC). A primary role of the UPDC is to enlist SMEs from line organizations to design, develop, and deliver critical, discipline and job-relevant curricula that train future generations of petroleum engineer and geoscientists. The UPDC utilizes teams of learning and development (L&D) specialists to work closely with SMEs to ensure technical courses contain best practices for effective learning and delivery methods. This collaboration assures that training is strategically aligned to organization needs, is delivered efficiently, and provides effective knowledge transfer that is measured and benchmarked. In 2016, the UPDC documented the success of this process by highlighting a roadmap to improve well intervention operations through the design, development, and delivery of well intervention courses (Ginest et al.). Similarly, the knowledge and experience obtained from a coiled tubing (CT) course were crucial for designing a cost-effective corrosion inhibition matrix. This paper demonstrates the course effectiveness in which a participant applied the knowledge received from the UPDC training content to improve business outcomes. The business impact from the implementation of this knowledge transfer is a showcase for successful operational optimization. The project included literature review, analysis of current service provider practices, laboratory test design, tests and evaluations, and the development of an acid corrosion inhibition matrix best practice for CT acidizing. This knowledge transfer case demonstrates how the successful application of knowledge transfer through training to the business workflow saves time and money, engages young talent working with experienced SMEs, and realizes the pinnacle metric of a training program, Return on Investment (ROI).

Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is an approach to training that has been used in various industries for more than 40 years though with limited application in the oil and gas industry. PBL has two fundamental goals: 1) to support participants as they learn the required domain skills and knowledge; 2) to support the participants through the process of learning to be self-directed, self-regulating problem-solvers. The first goal should be the minimum expectation of any technical training program. The second goal has more varied utility, since becoming self-directed learners and problem-solvers are not always learning outcomes required of technical training. But when these are required, PBL is the tool of choice. In this paper we will identify the critical attributes that define PBL; we will briefly discuss when PBL is ideal and when it is not; we will also report on a problem-based, instructional development project conducted at the Upstream Professional Development Center (UPDC) at Saudi Aramco. We will describe the analysis, design, development, and delivery phases of the project with a focus on key processes and products that resulted because of the PBL approach. Lastly, evaluation data will be analyzed and conclusions will be drawn.