Oil & Gas · ~$48B
Meridian Energy Group
permanent staff
14,000–22,000contractors
2.5analytics maturity
Historically a build-first organisation: people joined young, were grown over long careers, and stayed. That model produced deep capability and is now under strain — the build pipeline cannot fill the cliff fast enough, so Meridian has leaned on contractors for surge and specialist capacity, which solves a capacity problem while quietly creating a cost-opacity and capability-ownership problem.
What keeps leadership up at night
Strategic challenges
The great crew change in licensed roles
37% of senior subsurface, operations and maintenance leadership is retirement-eligible within five yearsThese are the roles that hold operating licences and sign off on safety-critical decisions. A gap here is an operational and regulatory exposure, not a vacancy to backfill.
Contractor dependence and cost opacity
Contingent labour is ≈30% of total annual workforce cost (≈$1.4B in drilling, turnaround and EPC spend) and absent from board headcount reportingRoughly a third of what Meridian spends to field a workforce is invisible to the people accountable for workforce strategy, governed instead as line-item procurement.
A missing mid-career bench
Ready-now successor coverage on critical roles sits at 41%, and most named successors are not licence-readySuccession plans report coverage that does not exist in operational terms, which means leadership is managing a risk it believes is smaller than it is.
Shape of the workforce
Composition
Operations & field technicians
34%Engineering & subsurface
22%Maintenance & turnaround
15%Corporate & functions
17%Commercial & trading
6%Leadership
6%The work
Projects
Total Workforce Baseline: Counting the Whole Crew
How many people does it actually take to run Meridian — and what does that whole workforce cost — once contractors are counted the way the operation actually uses them?
Sponsor · VP, Workforce Planning & People Analytics
The Great Crew Change: Succession Risk in Licensed Roles
Which roles will the great crew change actually break first — and is the succession bench as ready as the talent reviews claim?
Sponsor · Chief Operating Officer
Attrition & Capability Forecast: Modelling the Cliff
If nothing changes, how big is the capability gap in two years — and which interventions actually move it?
Sponsor · VP, Talent & Organisational Effectiveness