The company's regional director Mike Hosford previously said operators had to send workers to Florence in Italy, where GE's gas turbine and compressors headquarters is located, for training.

While this brought workers up to speed on operations, maintenance and installation of the equipment, there was no way to map that around Australian requirements.

In a partnership with training provider Navitas, Hosford said people trained at the new centre would receive Australian standard certifications as well as specific instruction on the use of GE equipment.

"We saw an opportunity to really make a difference, we partnered with Navitas. We have taken our training modules, which are specific to customer equipment, they [Navitas] take that training and map it to the Australian competencies," said Hosford.

"All that is done in advance of the courses and when we deliver the courses here, they will actually issue a certificate to the employee or customer who takes that course."

He said this had allowed Chevron to send an initial 150-200 people for training here, rather than sending eight "super users" to Florence who would then return to train the rest of the workforce.

Hosford added GE had formed a "community of best practice", bringing together operators, training providers, Apprenticeship Australia and Challenger.

It then applied for the critical skills investment fund the federal government had opened up and received about $A2.5 million in funding from its first round.

"There is certain criteria we have to do, each of the businesses including ourselves have to put a certain number of people through, they have to get to the next stage of accreditation, we have to spend a certain amount of investment within a certain period," he said.

"It is a great impetus to get everybody moving towards training in the right way."

On attracting young people into the industry, Hosford said the company actively engaged with high schools and he felt young people could now see the potential of a career in engineering.

"They can see in Australia the potential salaries that someone can make from being an engineer, job security," he said.

"It is not short term, it is not the next five years. It is the next 20 to 30 years easily with the size of these fields. They will always need good people."