ZapSibNeftekhim: about the Forum of Young Specialists and opportunities for industry youth

When a company is a member of the top league of Russian petrochemicals and is one of its leaders, its team should have only the best employees. Director of Personnel Management, ZapSibNeftekhim LLC (SIBUR's Tobolsk facility) Andrey Belov spoke about the effectiveness of corporate and industry competitions, why young professionals are accepted for internships from the third year and why employees become trainers.

SIBUR is one of the key partners of the Reliable Change Foundation and its flagship project, the CASE-IN International Engineering Championship. The youth teams of the company's enterprises regularly participate in the prestigious project and achieve significant results. In 2021, the SIBUR Young Professionals Forum was held for the first time, a new page in the rich history of cooperation between the industry company and the CASE-IN championship.  

— In 2021, ZAPSIB employees collected a whole harvest of awards at professional competitions. Is this an accident or a natural result?

— ZapSib has always been an advanced company. But in 2021, our guys performed really well — they won eight prizes at the Petro Chem Skills industry championship and three more at the All—Russian WorldSkills Hi-Tech. Our team of young specialists won the final of the corporate forum and represented SIBUR at the International Engineering Championship "CASE-IN". It was the first time the guys participated in competitions of this level and entered the top four. This is a good result and a confident bid to win in the future. There are a lot of victories, and it's nice, but they are valuable not in themselves, but as an indicator of well-organized work with personnel. Internship and adaptation programs, mentoring systems, investment of time and effort on the part of managers. Contests just highlight it.

— Were there any personnel discoveries for the management in connection with these victories?

— I think that there were pleasant surprises for the leaders. Although usually active employees in production are process leaders. Observing contests — how the participants behave, what results they achieve and by what means, how much they coincide with our values — all this gives managers important markers for the future recruitment of employees to the team.

— Which competitions have you followed yourself?

— For the forum of young professionals. The interest was huge: 600 participants from SIBUR as a whole, and more than 70 from ZAPSIB. Everyone who showed up at the start kept their drive until the finish. In fact, it was an engineering talent show, where participants were asked to find creative solutions to real production problems. There were 16 teams from different companies of SIBUR. Everyone performed very well, so it's especially nice that our team, So2kraschenie, won the final. The guys proposed a solution for the production of methane with zero carbon emissions, successfully defended the case at the SIBUR level and took part in the International Engineering CASE-IN Championship, gaining invaluable experience in engineering competitions of this level.

— There are probably more requests for career growth among young specialists and engineers. What are their main development tracks?

— Contests give young specialists the opportunity to understand what is closer to them: to organize work, to engage in expertise or projects — these are the basic development tracks. If you follow the expert path, it will be a deepening into a specific topic, interaction with the professional community. If you focus on organizing people and processes, then you need to develop managerial skills. As for the project track, the competition itself is, in fact, a project — with a start, a finale and the rules of the game. Therefore, the value for the guys is not only to win, but to decide on further development. As an employer, it is important for us to compare the desire of employees with the opportunities that the company can provide: if they converge, then a success story is inevitable.

— How do you solve the problem of lack of qualified personnel?

— Any company wants to have the most qualified staff. Striving for this is an endless process. We are solving the issue of renewal at the expense of young specialists. We have well-established ties with the country's leading universities: in addition to Tyumen, these are Gubkin Moscow Art Technical University, the Far Eastern Federal University, and Novosibirsk State University. We select students in them. In 2021, there were 52 interns. They all had mentors who had previously completed special courses from SIBUR. Among the areas of study were both traditional disciplines — "Chemical Technology", "Industrial Thermal Power Engineering", and new ones — "Automation of technological processes and productions", "Mechatronics and Robotics". In 2022, the plan is to hire another 100 young employees. At the same time, the renewal of the team creates internal competition, but there is nothing wrong with that, because SIBUR supports the idea of continuous development, especially since the company itself is growing — it is building new plants and acquiring new assets.

— How do you see the employees of the future at ZAPSIB?

— These are active, restless people, open to new ideas. We identify them, including through contests, if we go back to the beginning of our conversation. And we already have such "employees of the future". Recently, young specialists and I discussed a project that takes into account the carbon footprint of the material already at the production stage. In other words, our new generation initially thinks along the lines of sustainable development. They are not blinded, they understand that plastic, from the point of view of the ecology of production, wins over other materials. If we talk about the HR component, then the number of professions for employees of the future should decrease many times - we are going to ensure that each position has an engineer who deeply understands technology and knows all the processes. And this is a challenge for us as an employer — how to recruit new people, how to train them so that they become full-fledged team members in a short horizon. Because we don't have time for long preparation.

Full version of the interview – on the website of the Kommersant newspaper