Crunch time

His Majesty the Sultan of Brunei awarded Dato Paduka Sumadi, one of the recipients, at the Youth Day this morning at the Indoor Stadium

The Energy Minister was delighted that more than 1,000 have secured jobs at the Oil and Gas sector. Image taken from The Brunei Times’ website.

More than 1,000 new jobs have already been taken up by locals within the oil and gas sector, surpassing the Energy Department at the Prime Minister’s Office’s (EDPMO) target for local employment this year, said the Energy Minister.

Yang Berhormat Pehin Datu Singamanteri Colonel (Rtd) Dato Seri Setia (Dr) Hj Mohd Yasmin Hj Umar confirmed that 1,114 jobseekers had secured posts in the oil and gas industry to date, exceeding the minimum target of 1,000 jobs by the year-end.

“We’ve reached our target, more than we’ve expected,” he told the media.

The minister (pictured), who was very pleased with the achievement, said that the EDPMO’s on-going local business development (LBD) drive contributed to the department reaching their intended target, which hopes to see an increase from the initial 37 per cent of local employment to 45 per cent this year.

Since the initiative started early this year, the EDPMO has been giving “wake-up calls” to oil and gas industry players to create and provide jobs to locals, as well as organising two successful job fairs. These recruits consisted of professional, skilled and semi-skilled workers filling in new jobs in Brunei’s major economy driver.

As envisioned in the draft Energy White Paper, the EDPMO is pushing to produce 5,000 professional and 35,000 skilled and semi-skilled Bruneian workers for the oil and gas industry, both in the upstream and downstream sector, with a target of 80 per cent local employment by the time the country realises its national Vision 2035.

“We have proven that it can be done. We can see now that the industry is employing people, and this (achievement) shows that, between the government and Brunei Shell Joint Venture companies, we have a good channel of communications at all levels,” he added.

“We want to do more for next year. Our KPI (key performance indicators) is maybe too low this year, so we plan to increase our KPI next year,” he added.

YB Pehin Dato Hj Mohd Yasmin was speaking during a dialogue session between the EDPMO and senior officials of Brunei Shell Petroleum Company Sdn Bhd (BSP) yesterday.

The dialogue, held at Pusat Insani in Seria, was aimed to discuss issues and new ideas with BSPpersonnel towards enhancing their competency in their respective fields. “Dialogues like this is very important, as it will shape our future industry,” he told the media. Text courtesy of Al-Haadi Abu Bakar of The Brunei Times.

Leny working behind the scenes and thanks for updating me on the event 😀

Preparing for the event launch tomorrow

The map for the job fair

The guys from Kwad Advertising preparing for the event

The official t-shirt for the job fair

Check out the deals at your preferred travel agents

Almost 5,000 runners have registered for the Bank Islam Brunei Darussalam Charity Expedition for ALAF which is slated for next Sunday (Oh man, and I have not jogged yet). Yesterday a briefing was conducted and hosted by BIBD led by Hjh Nurul Akmar Hj Mohd Jaafar, the Head of Corporate Social Responsibility of BIBD, and also present were representatives from Royal Brunei Police Force, HEART, RIPAS Hospital, JMPC, Brunei Amateur Athletics Association, Cityneon, CE-ALAF’s official logistics partner and Adxpert, the official event management partner.

The funds raised for the event will helped the under privileged students to continue their studies and stay in any of the educational institutions. The charity drive is branded as Charity Expedition for ALAF or CE-ALAF. The ALAF programme, which is short for Advocating Life Long Learning for an aspiring Future is a BIBD CSR initiative that seeks to support the nation’s aspiration to build a well-educated and highly-skilled human resource pool by providing opportunities of educational progression to underprivileged students.

Remember that the event for the collection of the Race Entry Pack is tomorrow (Sunday) at Orchid Garden Hotel between 1:30pm to 8:30pm (from Sunday 7th October to Tuesday 9th October). There will be a Crossfit demo and fitness clinic conducted by GetFit CrossFit from 2pm to 5pm and it will be held at the parking area outside OGH and near the Anggrek Desa Swimming Pool.

Below are the timings for the categories

50km cycling – 6am flag off
21km runners – 6:15am flag off
10km runners – 6:30am flag off
5km runners – 6:45am flag off
2.5km runners – 7am flag off

Oh yeah, do take note that there will be a finisher medal for 21km and 10km runners. However, there’s a condition that you are to complete the run at a cut off time of 3 hours for 21km and 2 hours for 10km.

Parking will be at Hassanal Bolkiah Stadium and do be alert of leaving your belongings in your car due to increase of break-ins especially during big events. There will be more than four hundred volunteers and officials assisting the event as well.

So mark your date on Sunday 14th October and let’s do this for charity :))