Bharat Petroleum Corporation is readying a career growth script for its employees which will prepare them for future challenges.
As part of this plan, a full-fledged ‘learning centre’ is being readied at Kochi’s Marine Drive promenade which should become a reality in 2018.
When it is ready to roll, the vast pool of talent within BPCL can access some of the best brains in India and the world from the Indian Institutes of Management, Indian School of Business, Harvard, Wharton and the like.
The company has already been carrying out training programmes for its employees. However, these are done through different executive batches through a year. Even here, the kind of training imparted has some of the top guns from Ivy League schools globally, but BPCL believes it makes more sense to have a dedicated institute in place.
“Getting trained by some of the world’s best management experts is absolutely imperative at this point in time,” says a top official. Today, things are a lot different with the advent of digital age and onset of competition.
BPCL has also grown exponentially beyond the time it only had a handful of refineries in its kitty and had to focus primarily on fuel sales. Today, it is a company that has huge plans in exploration and production where the new frontiers are countries like Mozambique and Brazil.
In addition, it is looking at a host of energy alternatives like solar.
Besides, the company is in a phase of rewriting its retail fuel strategy with the prime focus being customer convenience and providing varied services by participating in the Centre’s financial inclusion initiative.
Staying ahead “It is also important to keep in mind that all workplaces are going digital which means companies like BPCL need to constantly stay ahead of the intellectual curve. The learning tools of yesterday will not help today’s cause,” adds the official.
Effectively, all this requires top levels of expertise to cope with these new challenges. While typically there is no better alternative to on-the-job learning, there are a host of new skills required both here and overseas.
What has been especially heartening to the BPCL management is that the young flow of talent from top engineering, management and professional schools is eager to push the envelope. “They are totally involved with the company and are keen to see it enter a host of new business areas. BPCL is clearly in good hands,” says the official.
This puts in context why the training centre at Kochi is an integral part of the bigger plan to develop human resources effectively. Kochi is already home to BPCL’s refinery, which recently expanded capacity to 15 million tonnes and is its largest facility. The other refineries are in Mumbai, Bina (Madhya Pradesh) and Numaligarh in Assam.