Students on an exciting new international apprenticeship training programme took their first classes this week at Forth Valley College’s Falkirk Campus.
The BP Mauritania and Senegal National Apprentice Technician Training Programme – a collaborative project between FVC and Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) who are acting as strategic partners to the global oil and gas giant – aims to develop and prepare national technicians in the production, mechanical, instrumentation and electrical fields to work safely, efficiently and compliantly on project facilities in the west African nations by attaining internationally recognised, accredited qualifications.
A total of 48 apprentice technicians have been recruited on the programme and after their 68 week (12 of which was online) course, they will be qualified to work on the Greater Tortue/Ahmeyim (GTA) Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) project, an innovative, multi-billion-dollar investment to develop a world-class gas field on the maritime border of Mauritania and Senegal, where BP is the Operator.
At an event to mark the first day of the programme on Monday 27 September, a host of VIPs from all three organisations joined the cohort of apprentices to help them ease into their new environment. These included speakers on the day from BP David Dickson, VP Operations and Rebecca King, VP Production, Mauritania and Senegal, Fiona Stewart Knight, GCU Assistant Vice Principal Business Partnerships & Director of the Institute for University to Business Education and FVC Principal Dr Ken Thomson OBE.
All the apprentices will be registered students of Forth Valley College and will study a range of oil and gas specific HNC qualifications within the college’s specialised lab and simulator environment at the Falkirk Campus, exiting with an SVQ Level 2 in Performing Engineering Operations and a HNC in either Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Measurement and Control (Instrumentation) or Chemical Engineering.
Sustainability is a core aim of the programme as BP’s new strategy as of 2020, will seek to pivot from being an international oil company focused on producing resources, to an integrated energy company focused on delivering solutions for customers within a sustainability framework, linking the organisation’s purpose with net zero ambitions. The GTA project will therefore be within the Low Carbon Electricity and Energy stream of BP’s strategy.
Dr Ken Thomson, Principal of Forth Valley College, said: “It was really exciting to welcome the eager new apprentices on the BP Mauritania and Senegal National Apprentice Technician Training Programme on Monday and we can’t wait to see how they all progress on this exciting course. Our expertise in this field is second to none, our facilities are state-of-the-art and we can confidently say, that by the end of this year long course these apprentice technicians will be some of the best trained oil and gas technicians in the world.”
