Dear SPE London members and colleagues,

I hope you have had a very enjoyable break – the weather was great for us this summer in London!

Now the Section is getting ready to start another eventful operational year 2018/19.

Our busy calendar of events is currently being populated by our committees. We are planning to deliver a program card detailing these events to our members shortly – please visit our website to keep up-to-date with upcoming events. We are positive we can once again fulfil our primary purpose of knowledge sharing.

Some new and exciting updates within the structure of the Section are coming this year!

While we continue to deliver a great array of events for our members, we were getting feedback from senior professionals who felt they were lacking attention. While we have a dedicated committee serving the needs and interests of our younger engineers, our seniors seemed to have been forgotten.

In response, this year we have decided to set up a Senior Professionals (SP) Board Liaison, which may lead to creating an (SP) Committee. Senior professionals would be members aged 55 and older, and this initiative would seek to keep them engaged as they commence their career transition to retirement.

The benefits would be multi-fold: not only would it establish a strong relationship with Senior Professionals to allow the greater community to benefit from their expertise and network, it would also seek to address specific problems, such as age discrimination in the workplace or recruitment process. Does ageism still exist? And if so, how can we help stop it?

This presents an example of how feedback from our members can strengthen the effectiveness of our community and ensure that knowledge is retained for future generations of oil and gas professionals. We welcome feedback regarding our new initiative and other ideas which could help this section continue to flourish.

Feel free to contact us by e-mail: SPELondon@spemail.org or get in touch through our social media on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter.

Kind regards,

Dr Olga Bradulina

SPE London Chairperson