By 2022, it is estimated that more than a quarter of the pipeline workforce will be retirement eligible, and the industry is still facing a shortage of experienced workers from market downturns and people moving to other industries. At the same time, the industry is requiring an increase in technical competencies for many engineering, maintenance, and operations positions because of digital technologies being introduced that are changing the way fieldwork is done.
To add to the complexity, field workers are often working on their own in remote locations without easy access to help. They are working on heterogeneous assets and multi-generational equipment where no system is the same. And support documentation that covers different scenarios and variances from site to site is often limited or non-existent.