Human resources

Technical Master Class: A New Approach to Knowledge Transfer

Technical master classes (TMCs) are a new training concept designed to accelerate building expertise among geoscience, engineering, and commercial professionals.

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Technical master classes (TMCs) are a new training concept designed to accelerate building expertise among geoscience, engineering, and commercial professionals. The ExxonMobil TMC concept emphasizes transferring knowledge from experts to practitioners through a training process that blends mentoring and traditional technical training. Rather than teaching only the factual knowledge and technical concepts that dominate traditional classes, the master-class learning experience simulates real technical situations so that experts can coach practitioners through the complexities of an issue.

Introduction

In 2008, ExxonMobil’s executive leadership team challenged its upstream organization to address imminent knowledge and experience gaps in its technical workforce resulting from severe demographic shifts that threatened the entire petroleum industry. With the guidance of internal and external experts, a framework of solutions was proposed, aimed at accelerating the transfer of collective experience within the upstream organization. A project team was formed, and the concept of a TMC was piloted, revised, and implemented.

The goal of the master-class project was to develop a training format that could effectively share experts’ unique knowledge and ways of approaching complex problems. This is a difficult objective because of the very nature of expertise. Intuition and know-how are difficult to articulate and even more difficult to teach in a training classroom. In comparison, traditional technical-training classes teach explicit knowledge: information and processes that have been identified, articulated, and captured in a way that is transferable in print and lecture.

A challenge the development team faced was verifying the value proposition of the master-class concept. Unlike other initiatives in the framework that affected a majority of the upstream workforce, the TMC concept targeted a relatively small portion of the upstream population. The TMCs focused on practitioners that showed potential for becoming the next technical experts. This is a much smaller population compared with that of other technical training programs that target all 1- to 5-year employees, or all midcareer employees. After piloting the training concept for more than a year, however, the development team collected enough data to verify the value of the TMC concept in more ways than were originally expected.

Statement of Theory and Definitions

Experts are characterized as having superior memory for information in their domain; better awareness of their own knowledge and knowledge deficits; greater pattern recognition; faster and more-accurate solutions (although they tend to spend more time initially analyzing problems before solving them); and deeper, more-highly-structured knowledge. In the oil and gas industry, technical experts apply their domain knowledge when making complex decisions on the job. Specific research describes the characteristics of expertise regarding decision-making skills: recognizing patterns (situation awareness), making fine perceptual discriminations, recognizing typicality and detecting anomalies, mentally simulating future states (to evaluate courses of action) and past states (to generate explanations for events), improvising, and adapting to events. However, a common problem associated with experts is their inability to articulate their thinking processes. The goal of ExxonMobil’s TMC is to teach students, through technical decision making, how the expert thinks.

As research on teaching expertise was collected for use in the TMC concept, the apprenticeship model was identified as a prominent method of teaching expertise. Historically, the apprenticeship model was used to pass on skills from one generation to the next, supporting the development of competency and, often, expertise. In the literature on apprenticeships, the key terminology describing the stages of developing expertise in terms of roles includes

  • Novice: A probationer with some minimal exposure to the domain.
  • Apprentice: A student undergoing a program of instruction, conventionally living with and assisting someone at a higher level.
  • Journeyman: Someone who can perform work unsupervised, though under orders. Experienced and reliable, with a recognized level of competence.
  • Expert: A distinguished and recognized journeyman whose judgments are accurate and who can deal with difficult cases.
  • Master: A journeyman or expert who is also qualified to teach those at a lower level. Often part of an elite group whose judgments set the regulations, standards, or ideals.

Description and Application of Processes

Class-Design Elements. ExxonMobil’s TMCs are a formal training experience in which senior technical experts challenge technical practitioners (journeymen, not novices) to think differently about complex technical decision making. These experts do not teach one correct answer or one right way to solve a problem. The class is a dialogue between teacher and students in which both are thinking out loud together in order to develop expertise. To promote deep and honest discussion, TMCs in ExxonMobil are smaller in size and shorter in duration than traditional technical training classes. TMCs are typically 1 to 2 days in length and consist of one to two experts, approximately four to 10 learners (nominated by management), and a discussion facilitator, whose role is to monitor and coach the experts during the class experience so that they do not rely on lecture but instead engage students with effective questioning strategies.

Knowledge Capture: Master-Class Development. Capturing experts’ knowledge is a complex activity. Because of the nature of tacit knowledge, experts struggle with identifying much of what they know before the learning experience. Experts need time to pause, reflect, and explore their unique way of knowing and decision making. Once an expert is identified to develop and teach a class, that expert meets with a learning specialist in the technical training organization. The learning specialist then prompts the expert to begin the reflection process in order to externalize his or her tacit knowledge. The driving question prompting the expert is, “What is unique about your expertise?”

The process of externalizing experts’ knowledge continues as the expert identifies learning objectives for the class. Once the expert has identified his or her unique expertise in a way that is translated into learning objectives, the next step in the development process is for the expert to identify technical/business scenarios that will serve as the context for the TMC. Each class typically has two to five technical scenarios that the learners think through with guidance from the expert.

ExxonMobil experts who have taught multiple TMCs report that knowledge of their own thinking processes is clearer after they have engaged in teaching a master class, a result of its dialogue-based learning structure.

Knowledge Sharing: Delivery of the Master Class. The expert’s unique knowledge is transferred and shared as a result of the interaction that takes place between expert and learner during the TMC experience. Each TMC within ExxonMobil is made up of a series of scenarios that the expert has designed on the basis of prior experiences, possible future scenarios, or fictional situations. Some scenarios take the learner sequentially through a technical project that emphasizes critical judgment calls. For example, an environmental expert developed a master class that took learners through a 20-year project dealing with the management of a sensitive environment. As a result, key learnings that took the expert 20 years to experience were condensed to five judgment calls in a 1-day TMC and were used to accelerate the participants’ expertise in dealing with similar sensitive environments.

Each scenario begins with the expert explaining pertinent background information and leading the learners through the scenario up to the point at which a judgment call or technical/business decision needs to be made. At that point, the learners are encouraged to work independently or in small groups to make a recommendation. After adequate time to work the problem, learners present their solutions to the class. During the presentation, questions are welcomed from the expert(s) and fellow students in the class. Once presentations have concluded, the expert then reveals how the real-life project unfolded, thereby providing more of his or her own unique insight for learners.

These classes differ greatly from traditional training classes in that students are heavily involved in dialogue and are individually challenged by the instructor/expert. Socratic questioning methods are taught to the experts before the class, and experts are expected to create an outline of essential questions that guide learners through scenarios. For example,

  • What type of data sources would you use?
  • What are the project-phase risks/challenges?
  • How could these be effectively managed?
  • Who are other key people that should be involved?
  • What about cumulative effects?
  • What/who is the competition?

In addition to the planned essential questions, experts also need to be prepared to stimulate students’ thinking with probing questions. Probing questions typically follow a student’s response and challenge the student’s thought process, making his or her thinking visible to the class. For example,

  • What is an alternative?
  • Would you say more about that?
  • What could we assume instead?
  • What led you to that belief?
  • Why do you think that is true?

Results

At the end of 2011, the project team had enough follow-up survey data to define the parameters of what contributed to a successful TMC. On the basis of the core definitions of an ExxonMobil TMC, the following results summarize the data collected from participants in the pilot phase of the project:

  • More than 80% successfully applied their specific TMC learning objective on the job within 6 weeks of class.
  • More than 85% responded that they expanded their approach to solving complex technical problems and making technical judgment calls.
  • More than 90% agreed that their technical networks had expanded as a result of attending the class.
  • More than 90% agreed that TMCs were a worthwhile investment for ExxonMobil and for his or her personal career development.

In addition, an unexpected result of the TMC process was that the experts learned and adopted a new way of teaching. Every expert involved in such a class has been an experienced technical instructor, and every expert has reported adopting a new approach to his or her teaching style as a result of teaching a TMC. Experts reported that preparing for these classes is very different from preparing for a traditional, lecture-based class. Experts are often nervous about the unpredictable directions the discussion will take and the knowledge and ability of the learners to contribute to the topic adequately. It is common for experts to experience anxiety before teaching a TMC for the first time, because they realize that the direction of the class is controlled by the learners and that the expert will be responsible for guiding the spontaneous discussion. Once the class begins and the experts engage the participants in deep discussion and challenge the learners’ thinking with questioning strategies, however, everyone in the class is engaged and immersed in learning and thinking. Once the class is over, experts report a renewed excitement for teaching and an interest in using questioning strategies and discussion techniques.
This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper IPTC 16752, “Technical Master Class: A New Approach to Knowledge Transfer,” by Crystal Gully, ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company, prepared for the 2013 International Petroleum Technology Conference, Beijing, 26–28 March. The paper has not been peer reviewed. Copyright 2013 International Petroleum Technology Conference. Reproduced by permission.