Many states require drillers to have training and professional development to maintain licensing. Given how critical it is, we wondered how best to engage students and keep them interested, so they take away something from training other than a signed sheet saying they attended. For today’s talk, we went to an expert.

Jeff Blinn served as training manager for Baroid IDP for about a decade before his recent retirement. In addition, he has worked as a drilling fluids engineer and has a degree in geology. He led popular, well-attending training events for years, so we thought, who better to talk to about making training for drillers relevant and engaging?

“Things need to be presented in a way that the attendee, when he leaves, has something useful for the time he spent listening,” Blinn says. “Another bad thing is to be boring. There are a lot of very wise and intelligent people who have no business being in front of a group of people because they don’t know how to get that point across. Nobody gets any value from that.”

Host Jeremy Verdusco, editor of National Driller, and co-host Brock Yordy, expert drill trainer and National Driller writer, discuss these and other training and mentoring issues with Blinn on this episode of Drilling In-Site. What kinds of training puts you to sleep? What types of training leave you feeling energized about the industry? Comment below or send an email to verduscoj@bnpmedia.com.

Resources

In this episode, we talk about some older training videos Jeff Blinn did for Baroid IDP with co-host Brock Yordy behind the camera. See a couple of those videos here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lGxBsOMWw8&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StiSE85ZTfo&feature=youtu.be