A group of 16 new apprentices have been chosen from 600 Western Australians to start the ball rolling in battling the next looming skills shortage in the LNG sector.
The program will eventually produce qualified process operators, mechanical fitters and instrumentation electrical apprentices.
Unless there are more delays like the one Chevron Corporation announced for Wheatstone last Friday, the number of LNG trains operating in Australia should more than double from 10 to 21 within three years.
Australia is the third-largest LNG producer in the world and is expected to take the top spot from Qatar by 2019.
Yesterday the first intake of an innovative nation-first program was unveiled - a group of high school graduates who were tested and vetted in order to spend two years at the Challenger Institute of Technology's Australian Centre for Energy and Process Training.
They will then spend the next two years at on and offshore installations belonging to Shell, Quadrant Energy, Woodside Petroleum and Vermillion Energy across the country.
Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Western Australia president and former Woodside executive Agu Kantsler said it was "out of necessity" that the concept of a specific process operator apprenticeship in Western Australia was born.
The Energy Apprenticeships Group is now Australia's only specialist oil and gas group training organisation.
"Half of the highly-skilled industry workforce is expected to retire over the next decade, yet it takes between eight years of training and on-the-job experience to fully replace process operators," he said.
"As the unprecedented number of LNG trains come into operation over the next three years, it's vital that the groundwork is laid to create the future workforce of skilled and safety-conscious workers."
The EAG academy training model was inspired by the Offshore Petroleum Industry Training Organisation which sets standards, competence and promotes workforce development for the UK.
In WA, the companies developed an industry approach to work with EAG to develop a standardised education and program to build an employment pipeline of "safe and highly-skilled" workers, Kantsler said.
"Greater efficiencies will be reached across the sector through the sharing of resources and costs and by reducing repetition in recruitment and training," he said.
"Trust me - you can burn up a lot of money coaching other people's people, (and) then having to replace everybody. It's much better if we get together and train to a common standard rather than relying on somebody else to do it for us."
The apprentices will receive ongoing support, mentoring and guidance to ensure they're meeting performance milestones, along with technical and life skills and a comprehensive knowledge of the oil and gas sector that will strengthen the industry overall, Kantsler said.
"This isn't about taking people who have been working in another [energy-related] job and getting them to now work as process operators, it's a long training course of four years," CCI CEO Deidre Willmott told Energy News .
The 16 just announced yesterday were in addition to 18 who have been recruited in Queensland just about to start a similar program.
"Their scores at school were relevant, as were their aptitude in maths and science; it was highly competitive," Willmott said.
"They will train collaboratively, but will be employed by one specific company."
EAG Academy apprentice Beth Clark, 19, who started work yesterday as part of the program, was looking forward to getting paid to learn for four years, at the end of which time she's a fully qualified process operator.
"All my friends are so jealous because they're all stuck doing a university degree and they don't have any income and they don't know what they want to do when they graduate," she said.
EAG employs over 180 people and has trained more than 800 apprentices and trainees to work at Australia's ten major oil and gas operators since 1997.
