Our people are the key to our success and their well-being, safety and security are core values underpinning how we do business.
We have an excellent safety record that we are determined to maintain as we continue to develop the business, prioritising health and safety, fairness, inclusion and opportunity to help create a professional, talented, diverse and engaged workforce.
read more about our People focus in our SUSTAINABILITY report
Objectives
Our key people objectives are:
- Maintain our licence to operate, and
- Provide a safe and healthy working environment.
We have identified five material issues that direct our focus within this area.
Ensuring a safe and risk-free working environment is an absolute priority.
No practical or commercial consideration is ever permitted to override the safety and well-being of our people, our contractors or communities. We work to the highest international standards; indeed, our own safety requirements often exceed those that local law may demand.
Our diversity and inclusion strategy aims to nurture an inclusive and sustainable culture. We encourage, embrace and recognise our differences as being key drivers of value for all our stakeholders. The Board is committed to ensuring that this inclusive culture is embedded in our organisation.
Our workforce is inherently culturally diverse, given that we are headquartered in Scotland and with a satellite office in Egypt. But more widely, we believe that a strong mix of backgrounds, genders, ages and lived experiences only enriches our business and makes Capricorn a better place to work.
Our commitment to DE&I also reaches beyond the physical boundaries of our business, respecting and contributing to, the Egyptian communities and societies where we are privileged to work. We reflect their values and perspectives in our social investment decisions and practices.
It has always been a priority to focus on the health and well-being of people at Capricorn. In 2023, with our transformation and redundancy programme, this became even more important.
We ran tailored support and communications throughout the reorganisation programme to support everyone’s mental health and how to cope with change.
We also gave a greater emphasis and opportunities to socialise across the business, recognising the positive impact that social interaction and strong working relationships have on mental health.
Encouraging a sense of togetherness at a difficult time also led us to rethink our hybrid working patterns. We increased the frequency of attending the office in person to four days a week and found that colleagues recognised the need for this change and fully embraced it.
In today’s increasingly competitive employment market, we recognise that attracting and growing the right talent and skills are critical to our continued success. We aim to understand and manage our talent, especially those wanting to progress to leadership roles, while our recruitment focus is directed to attracting excellent people from all of our communities. Throughout, we aim to utilise an individual’s skills and experience to deliver business value while providing job satisfaction and career development opportunities.
Optimised learning opportunities for our people help us operate to the highest standard and means our business can be more efficient, effective and successful. We invest in developing our people to help them fulfil their potential, deliver our objectives and meet the changing demands of our industry. Our Capricorn Learning Academy is a key tool to delivering that ambition, and it provides training portals and a training budget for our employees to support their career development.
Case study
Al Amal Graduate Programme – welcoming the next generation
As in other industries, the oil and gas sector needs to find and train the next generation of talented professionals to ensure its future. Even so, it is a sector that is hard to access, with graduates pursuing a limited number of opportunities.
The Al Amal (from the Arabic word meaning ‘hope’) graduate training programme is an initiative developed by the Egyptian Petroleum Exploration Society and the Egyptian Geophysical Society. Targeted at Egypt’s top Geoscience graduates – shortlisted based on performance under test/ interview conditions – the programme supports them to develop their technical knowledge and interpersonal skills, increasing their opportunities in a highly competitive industry.
Since Capricorn’s initial involvement with Al Amal in 2021, the programme has helped more than 120 graduates to pursue a career in a sector that has a vital role to play. Capricorn is proud be a top-level Platinum Sponsor of Al Amal, which entered its 15th round in 2023.
The programme adds an important practical dimension to the mainly theoretical nature of a degree through its hands-on and immersive approach, offering sector-specific courses and field trips to develop an understanding of the exploration/production cycle.
The programme enables graduates to:
- participate in field assignments, such as seismic programmes;
- explore AI applications, seismic interpretation, regional geology and much more; and
- take part in a lecture series delivered by oil and gas professionals.
Additionally, Capricorn offers an internship programme, creating a further opportunity for students to gain some real-world energy experience. In 2023 Capricorn welcomed two Al Amal graduates as interns in our Egypt office to work on exploration and development project evaluations.