Bentworth Contributes to the SPE KU Career Fair: 28th – 29th May
The Kenya University chapter of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, invited various organisations from the petroleum industry in Kenya to share their experiences of working and doing business in the industry. The conference was attended, on behalf of Bentworth, by Project Lead, Lynette Nyagah, who shared with the students details about:
- Bentworth and our areas of operation
- graduate intern programme
- different career paths available within Bentworth, including the technical and operational options.
There were various open and panel discussions with the attendees which focused at an industry level on:
- joining the industry after graduation and some of the reasons so few graduates moved into the petroleum engineering sector,
- collaboration between government and industry and where the gaps are,
- how to encourage research and innovation in the industry.
A large part of the discussions focused on the gap between industry and academia. It was noted that educational institutions tended to focus on ensuring that graduates acquired the technical skills required, however many graduates had limited experience with some of the softer skills required by the workplace, for example public speaking and presentation skills.
As a result SPE KU Chapter was tasked with investigating how graduates could be exposed to, and therefore be given the opportunity to develop, some of these softer skills.
Students were also asked to consider how they approached their career path in the future. To think of themselves as engineers first and petroleum engineers second and to be willing to learn other skills that would enable them to remain within the engineering field in their future careers.
For further information about SPE KU and what they do, you can follow their Twitter feed here.
