The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC Ltd.) is putting the country’s trainers and universities on notice: keep pace with the energy transition or watch a new generation of technical jobs go elsewhere.
Kazachiyang Nuhu, chief human resources officer at NNPC Limited, told an industry audience this week that the shift toward gas, digitalisation, and lower-carbon energy is moving faster than Nigeria’s workforce can adapt to, and that the company will no longer pay for training that doesn’t produce measurable results on the job.
“Every naira spent on training must translate to a safer plant, a skilled employee, a stronger balance sheet,” Nuhu said.
The remarks mark one of the clearest warnings yet from NNPC’s leadership that Nigeria’s energy ambitions could stall not for lack of reserves or capital, but for lack of people qualified to run increasingly complex operations.
Nuhu framed the moment as a convergence of four forces: a policy shift driven by the Petroleum Industry Act and the government’s Decade of Gas push; investors favouring liquefied natural gas and cleaner fuels over legacy crude projects; artificial intelligence and automation compressing how quickly workers need new skills; and a younger workforce demanding purpose and flexibility rather than the career-for-life model that defined the industry for decades.
“Reskill. Reposition. Or risk becoming a spectator in our own industry,” Nuhu said, according to prepared remarks.
The company laid out a list of pain points it says are holding back Nigeria’s oil and gas sector: an aging workforce compounded by brain drain, popularly known in Nigeria as “japa,” alongside a widening gulf between what universities teach and what employers need from a new hire on day one.
NNPC also flagged persistent weaknesses in safety culture, oil theft and pipeline vandalism, patchy local supply of quality equipment, aging infrastructure, and gaps in digital and energy-transition skills.
Nuhu’s pitch to training providers was blunt: stop treating certification as the end goal. He said NNPC wants coursework tied directly to production, safety and cost outcomes, benchmarked against international standards such as those set by the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers, the American Petroleum Institute and ASME, and delivered using simulators, digital twins and virtual reality rather than lecture-hall instruction alone.
“We will partner only with trainers who teach the industry we are becoming, not the one we are leaving behind,” Nuhu said.
NNPC also used the address to showcase its own workforce pipeline, which runs new hires through a foundation training program before placing them in on-the-job rotations, cross-postings with international oil companies and joint-venture partners, and a mentoring scheme designed to retain institutional knowledge as older engineers retire.
The company said it is rethinking how it measures Nigerian content in the industry — moving away from headcount quotas toward a standard based on capability.
“Not how many Nigerians were hired, but how many world-class Nigerians led the project,” Nuhu said, adding that “true local content is measured in expertise, not percentages.”
Looking further out, Nuhu identified four areas, which he called frontiers, where he said Nigerian talent needs to catch up quickly: integrating renewable energy and managing methane emissions on the technical side; applying artificial intelligence to operations and predictive maintenance on the digital side; understanding carbon markets, ESG reporting and sustainable finance on the commercial side; and building adaptive leadership and cross-cultural collaboration skills on what he termed the human side.
“When the future of energy arrives, will Nigeria be a contributor or a customer?” Nuhu asked.
He closed with a call for oil and gas companies, training providers and universities to stop working in parallel and instead coordinate around a shared standard for building capacity, telling academics to align curricula with what employers actually need and telling trainers to “rise to the global bar.”
“The future of Nigerian energy will be written, not in barrels or cubic feet, but in the capability of its people,” Nuhu said.
NNPC did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment on the scale of its training budget or a timeline for the workforce initiatives outlined in the address.
SOURCE: Businessday
