Competence and work experience. With the information provided by SPOC about the jobs, the level of competence and work experience needed is known and given to the PC. The PC has to evaluate whether there are any available personnel to use matching the criteria needed for the jobs. Service engineers at NOV are hired with different skill sets. These skills are divided into four competence categories, namely mechanics, hydraulics, electrics and automation (PLS). Most of the workers have either a combination of mechanics and hydraulics, or electrics and automation as these fields of work are most tightly connected. The documentation about the workers education and skills are stored in different places across various databases in somewhat of an unstructured way. After filtering out employees based on their experience, NOV generally groups them into two categories, experienced and less experienced. If a worker posses a skill of either one or both start-up or yearly (O - oppstart/start-up and Å - årlig/yearly), he is classified as experienced. There is also a group called T for testing, but is not as much used. This means that for the most demanding and complex job these workers are selected. Usually there are more jobs with a higher requirement of competence available than there are people to fill these positions, which sometimes make it a challenge to NOV. On the other hand, less experienced engineers on average have fewer jobs assigned to them, because of the priority going to the more skilled personnel. There is always a chance, when being out on a job, that engineers could face unforeseen issues which are not explained in the job description given by the customer. Through troubleshooting they may find other problems that make the job even more difficult to solve. Because of this the risk of having an inexperienced service engineer on site may result in being unable to resolve the issue within respectable time. Though the main categories give an indication of a service engineer‟s work profile, much of the information regarding the decisions the PC creates are based on other factors, that are of a more personal and informal kind. The level of enthusiasm and commitment towards receiving and accepting new jobs varies highly between the service engineers, which the PC gets an idea of when communicating with each individual. Even though a service engineer has a specific skill set and experience on paper, it does not necessarily mean that he or she is able to perform the job at hand. The PC calls...
