Leyla Sayfutdinova, PhD Candidate,
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
Multinational oil and gas exploration companies and their engineering contractors have been major employers of engineers in Azerbaijan since the dissolution of Soviet Union and the opening of Azerbaijan’s petroleum industry to international actors. These companies have played an important role in changing professional practices and the very notion of engineering professionalism in the country, and they have ‘transformed the local ways of doing things’ (Fourcade 2006). Employment in multinational companies had been highly prestigious in Azerbaijan, due to higher incomes, relative transparency of financial and managerial practices, and the global connections that it provides. It has opened many doors for Azerbaijani engineers, such as access to training opportunities, international secondments in other subsidiaries of their companies, globalized professional networks and membership in international professional organizations. But most importantly, employment in multinationals in Azerbaijan for many engineers became a start of international careers. Based on in-depth interviews with Azerbaijani engineers in Baku, Azerbaijan, and Houston, Texas, USA I argue that multinationals serve as quasi-credentializing institutions; employment at such companies validates local engineering degrees and can be used in lieu of formal degree acquired in internationally recognized institution.
Multinational companies entered Azerbaijan’s oil and gas industry in 1994, when a Production Sharing Agreement for the exploitation of an offshore Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oilfield in the Caspian was signed. From the beginning of the operations, the foreign companies were wary about employing local professionals: according to the Production Sharing agreement, in the early stages of the operations only 30-50% of professional employees were to be local, and this number included also financial, legal, HR and translation professionals. According to the interviews I conducted, it was not the lack of technical expertise, but rather the differences in Soviet and Western organizational cultures that were the main barrier for employment of local engineers. In practice, knowledge of English language, a rare skill in early post-Soviet Azerbaijan was put forward as a necessary requirement for employment in multinational.
However, the PSA provisions also stipulated increasing share of local specialists in the course of operations, aimed to reach 90% in five years after the full-field development stage (2006). In order to fulfill these obligations, mutlinationals began to employ young engineering graduates, and even to recruit students through internship programs rather than to attract experienced engineers. Having been one of the oldest oil regions in the world, Azerbaijan has a tradition of engineering education for oil and gas industry. However, due to inadequate state support and rampant corruption practices, in post-Soviet years the engineering education provided in local institutions has been of a lower standard and has failed to catch up with the recent technological developments in the industry. The multinational companies therefore designed special training and internship programs, combining detailed supervision, specialized in-house training courses and career development plans in order to compensate for the deficiencies of the locally provided education. After going through such intensive training and a few years of employment in the local operating companies of the multinationals, such engineers become globally employable. And many of these choose to leave Azerbaijan, as both the earnings for similar work and the quality of life abroad are usually higher. In fact, according to some of my interviewees the retention of trained engineers is an ongoing problem for multinational companies. Few of the engineers who want to leave Azerbaijan are able to be seconded abroad to another subsidiary of their multinational employer. Most, however, seek employment on their own, through international headhunting firms, and are able to find jobs in places as diverse as the Middle East, Siberia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, UK or the US. Interestingly, the majority of those who leave Azerbaijan only hold a degree from a local university, although they do receive certification for their various courses.
This emerging practice raises important questions about the relative importance of formal educational credentials vs practical working experience. For international careers, the two are complementary: while degrees from local Azerbaijani universities on their own are not internationally competitive, they are necessary for gaining employment at multinationals working in Azerbaijan. At the same time, work experience in the local oil and gas companies is also not sufficient for seeking jobs abroad, except, maybe in other former Soviet Union countries who share similar educational traditions and industrial practices. Thus, multinational companies serve as global ‘elite licensing institutions’ (Fourcade 2006) for engineers from Azerbaijan. The practice thus points at the development of new professional regime for engineering profession, at least in the oil and gas industry, where multinational companies, rather than universities, form the globally employable engineer. This function of multinational companies is especially important for developing and peripheral countries such as Azerbaijan, where multinationals succeed in producing globally employable professionals where local educational institutions fail.
References
Fourcade, Marion. “The construction of a global profession: The transnationalization of Economics1.” American journal of sociology 112.1 (2006): 145-194.
Sociology of Professional Groups 