Young Talents Program was created to develop professional, technical, and soft-skills of students from different technical disciplines. We put in a lot of energy and effort to mentor, coach, and teach students in a structured way to fully equip them with the right skills, ready to take on the challenges in the industry. Those students who go through this program are trained to become the future industry leaders and shapers of the technological and scientific progress. To achieve this, we created a very carefully and thoroughly thought through selection process, which is one of the most important building blocks of the program – identification of the talent.
Program Description
The program considers intensive classes in subsurface and drilling related disciplines with interactive lectures and practical exercises. Every class includes the theory and practice with the real data used on a daily basis in the industry. The classes are taught by highly skilled and motivated geoscientists and engineers from different companies, background and experience. Once you are part of Young Talents, you will be first introduced to the basics of the Petroleum Industry assuring that all students are on the same page regardless of the background and the specialty. As the classes progress, the students go through numerous mid term and project exercises that they have to pass in order to move on to the next stage.
Selection Process
We consider and review each application carefully as we believe in the talent and capability of everyone who is willing to participate in the program. However, we have very few slots available in this Program due to the limited resources and time of our mentors running the Program and therefore, we set forth a rigorous selection process to identify the best ones. At the moment we are focused on first and second year undergraduate students from all Universities with engineering or natural sciences oriented faculties and departments. We plan to announce the recruitment into this program each year using the posters and flyers at the Universities and the information on this website. Our selection process starts with the online application where the students submit a very basic information about their academic and non-academic achievements. The selected applicants are then invited to take ability and English tests. The students with the highest scores get next interviewed by the SPE Azerbaijan Section board on technical and people skills.
The History of Success
The onset of the program goes back to the early 2000’s when a group of mentors decided to volunteer their free time to support the higher educational institutions in petroleum related disciplines. It all started from a very small class of 4-5 students who were closely mentored by each industry professional in terms of technical and soft skills. In the following years, the program has grown to handle more students and included teaching classes in several disciplines. Young Talents program was later run in collaboration with Information Resource Complex in 2010 and finally got fully embraced by SPE Azerbaijan in 2012. To date, hundreds of students have benefited from the program. Amongst the graduates of the program are industry experts, PhD students of top schools in the World and industry leaders.
Soft Skills and Joint Sessions
The program includes a specially designed so called Joint Session where each student is given the opportunity to work out the given presentation topic and have it presented in front of the peers and senior industry professionals and leaders. By the end of each presentation, the students are given the full feedback on the ability to communicate and present the technical contents as well as receive comments on their ability to use the visual aids, relevance of the speech to the slides, body language and the pace of the presentation.
For detailed information on SPE Young Talents Program Highlights please refer to Young Talents Program Brochure.
If you have any questions regarding this program please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.