Offshore Europe

Offshore Europe was pretty busy, there were a lot of interesting stalls and stands, and I got the chance to meet a few people too. I also went to the lecture on Maintaining and attracting talent for the UK sector - the Secretary of State for Scotland, Jim Murphy was there. (He's the Labour representative in Scotland.) I have to say, I wasn't too impressed - he didn't really have the confidence or the quick thinking you would expect from a member of the Cabinet, but then I guess Scotland is pretty much a lost cause to the UK government these days anyway.

But enough of that. The lecture was interesting, Bob Fryer from Shell E&P was there, and he had a good overview of the international nature of the market we are in, as was the next speaker, Stephanie Brouwer of Halliburton. Prof Alistair Oag was next, and was the best speaker, he works for a big University now, and was more talking about the Graduate side, and David Doig from OPITO was the last one up. The 2 UK guys struck me as being a lot less aware of how international the market is now. There seems to be a bit of a culture of protectionism when it comes to our skillsets; trying to keep them in the UK. But the fact is most offshore guys don't want to work in the UK because of the taxes, so they would probably be better off attracting international talent!

The stalls were pretty good, Taqa had decided to just have a coffe bar, and a few of the Marine companies had free bars, which was popular. I can't list everyone who was there. If you're interested go to their website.

One final thing, an interesting point came up when I was talking to a potential client in Aberdeen with regard to temp work. They said that they prefer to use the Aberdeen agencies as they "knew the candidates better". I just wondered if any of you had good or bad experiences with your Aberdonian agencies, and if you did, please email me, or leave a comment.

The blog will be back to normal later in the week.