Engineering in the Energy Industry with Noah Dyer

00:00:00 Speaker 1
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00:00:27 Speaker 2
Welcome to the Energy Pipeline Podcast with your host, KC Yost. Tune in each week to learn more about industry issues, tools, and resources to streamline and modernize the future of the industry, whether you work in oil and gas or bring a unique perspective, this podcast is your Knowledge Transfer Hub. Welcome to The Energy Pipeline.

00:00:52 KC Yost
Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Energy Pipeline Podcast. Today we'll be discussing the hiring, training, and advancement opportunities for engineers wanting to work for an engineering consulting firm in the energy industry. I've known and worked with our guest for over 20 years and have always thought of him as an outstanding engineer, project manager and leader. His name, Noah Dyer, Vice President of Engineering and Technical Services at Percheron, LLC. Welcome to Rhe Energy Pipeline Podcast. Noah,

00:01:24 Noah Dyer
Great to be here, KC. Thank you.

00:01:26 KC Yost
Yeah, great having you on here. I've been looking forward to this conversation for quite a while, but before we get started talking about pipeline engineering careers, from your perspective, take a few minutes if you would please to share your background with our listeners. I'll just go ahead and throw my 2 cents worth in there. Valley boy that went to Aggieland to school, right?

00:01:48 Noah Dyer
Yes, originally from McAllen, Texas. Went to College Station for my undergraduate degree in chemical engineering, so I'm proud Texas Aggie, class of 2004. Spent the last, what, 20 years here now in the Houston area, working primarily at EPC companies. Currently working at Percheron as the Vice President of Engineering and Technical Services. I guess that's my official title. I oversee the engineering, environmental permitting, GIS, UAS Survey, construction management, inspection and procurement parts of Percheron. I have about 250 employees currently that report under me. Quite a diverse group of folks and been all over the world to do work. Worked a little bit over in Aberdeen, working for Wood Group for a while. Then most of my work here in the US midstream space, working on pipelines, gathering systems. I've done some offshore work, docks above and below ground storage facilities. Have held different roles in every aspect of a project, anywhere from the project management, construction management, project controls, procurements, engineering design, any of those things, all the way from concept through commissioning, so very diverse background.

00:03:33 KC Yost
You've got a PMP, and how many PE licenses do you have?

00:03:38 Noah Dyer
Yeah, I've got a PMP credential from the Project Management Institute, and then I've got a professional engineering license in 18 different states,

00:03:46 KC Yost
18 different states. All right. All right. Are you still growing that?

00:03:52 Noah Dyer
I hope not.

00:03:57 KC Yost
That's why you hire other engineers, right?

00:03:59 Noah Dyer
It's hard enough to keep up with 18. I can't imagine having 27 like somebody I know.

00:04:06 KC Yost
I got you. I got you, so how about a little elevator speech about Percheron LLC?

00:04:11 Noah Dyer
Sure, so Percheron is an EPCM company. We like to tap our integrated services in several different end markets, but we do all the technical services I listed as well as land acquisition, title research and LAD. We like to try to keep all those things together on a project, but we are an a-la-carte kind of company. We do offer those individual services on a standalone basis. Don't have to come to Percheron for everything, but do like to encourage our clients to do that. We service several different in-markets. Primarily Percheron was a midstream-based company, so we do a lot of midstream oil and gas work, transmission distribution, electrical power lines, renewable solar winds, battery storage, all your gen ties, any substation-type work, work in renewable natural gas and CO₂ recovery, things of that nature. Very spread out in what we do and what we try to accomplish. Service a lot of different industries and a lot of different clients. Percheron as a whole is about 850 employees, so relatively large company that is able to service just about every client that we can find in the lower 48 states.

00:05:57 KC Yost
I think that's interesting. That kind of leads into what I wanted to talk about. I mean, you guys work with electric transmission companies, you work with solar companies, you work with pipeline companies, you work with all of these other companies. Do you think having experience with multiple energy firms has made you a better engineer and manager?

00:06:19 Noah Dyer
I think so, considerably. My personal growth has been driven primarily by gaining different perspectives and experiences through different companies. Every company has a different way of approaching a project. Some are very detailed and they want to get into the weeds of things. Some are very, very economical in their approach, just want to get the job done. Just whatever industry standards are. You gain a different perspective looking at through both lenses and every lens kind of in between. It's generally driven by the size of the company in the markets that they serve. A company, for example, that deals only in data centers, they usually have a pretty pretty established design package, and there's very little reason for us to go in there and do any additional design or customization to what they have. It's really kind of plug and play. Whereas, a larger company, say they do heavy process facilities, they require substantial project team support and very prescriptive project management system to help maintain their budget schedule and scope on the project. It really just depends, but it makes you a better manager of your projects when you can kind of embrace what that is.

00:07:46 KC Yost
It's rare that a project goes without hiccups. There's always some kind of hiccup along the way, so you find having the experience with these multiple companies and these multiple industries, although, they're tied all into energy, help you deal with the challenges that come up in projects?

00:08:06 Noah Dyer
Right. Because you learn from every single project. Every opportunity you get to take a project from concept through commissioning and whatever in-market working in, you learn something new every time that you go through it. The lessons learned from a project can be easily translated to any project. It doesn't really matter what it is. Very rarely are they specific to that project. A lot of times they're a learning experience, something that you can put in the back of your mind and be able to pull up when needed to avert a possible similar situation in another project.

00:08:51 KC Yost
I've always argued that there are project managers and then there are project managers. We've started adding the senior project manager level, and we've started adding the director and all of that kind of stuff. At the end of the day, there are project managers that you can trust for encroachments and that type of work. There are others that can handle the thousand kilometer pipeline, and it all comes back to experience. Right?

00:09:21 Noah Dyer
That's exactly it. Exactly it.

00:09:24 KC Yost
Yeah, so let's talk about you when you were up at College Station or me when I was in Morgantown, and we have our younger selves and we want to pass on suggestions to our younger selves. What do you suggest to young engineering students if they want to work for a company like Percheron or some of your competitors out there in the energy industry?

00:09:53 Noah Dyer
For anybody coming in, what we call, I guess, new to industry, it doesn't have to be a new graduate from college. It could be a graduate from high school or just somebody who's been doing something else for a while and has come to Percheron for a different opportunity. Maybe they want to get into something that they find interesting that maybe their friends or somebody family members have been working in and just interest them quite a bit. I would come in with an open mind, be ready to work. We are constantly looking for good people to hire at Percheron. We don't go just come to us for a job that's not here for, we want to invest in our people as much as our people want to invest in us. If you can come in, have an idea of what you might want to do, what interests you, that's going to really help drive your career, I can't do that for you. I can't tell you what you like and what you don't like. Do that first. We can always train you to be the right person for the position that you're going to fill at Percheron. That's not a problem at all. The problem really pulls down to is trying to figure out what you like doing what you're good at. If you can have that ready to go, it's going to make things a lot easier for us to get along.

00:11:30 KC Yost
A few weeks ago, we did a podcast with Hoyt Brown, you know Hoyt.

00:11:34 Noah Dyer
I know Hoyt.

00:11:36 KC Yost
Yeah, Director of Engineering and Drafting for the natural gas projects for TC Energy. He was talking about hiring engineers and training engineers within an operating company and the diversity of opportunities. You can work in operations, you can work in engineering, you can go into a lot of different fields, go into marketing this, that and the other. With that, working for an engineering consulting firm, do you have that opportunity as well to get in and get your feet wet and try this realm and then that realm. I mean, I look at you and know that you've got a chem E degree, but most of your time is spent doing mechanical and civil and electrical work, right?

00:12:26 Noah Dyer
Right, so I mean, do what you love, right? That's what everybody tells you. Don't do something that you don't enjoy doing. There is room for lateral, or it could be lateral. It could be you could go up, go down. It doesn't make a difference, but do what you like doing. Let your manager know what that is. We can't help you grow if you can't provide us with feedback. As long as we're getting feedback from you, we know what interests you. Look at job postings, ask a lot of questions. There's limitless opportunities to grow. I can't come in and say there's one defined career path for you to get to where you want to go. Have an idea of what you want to do, but be willing to experience a lot of different things. We're going to put you through a lot of different areas of the company just so you can experience, and you may gravitate to one at the end of the day. That's kind of the idea of getting a new individual into the company, trying to figure out where they're going to add the most value for us and where they're going to enjoy doing their work. If they're happy, they're going to produce better results at the end of the day.

00:13:44 KC Yost
I want to talk about your client client size and how you have to adjust and adapt to that, but while we're talking about young engineers, what do you look for in a young engineer, say right out of school or someone with five years experience or a senior project manager? What characteristics are you looking for with those individuals?

00:14:10 Noah Dyer
For a young engineer that's coming to us, or even just a designer or whatever it might be, entry-level type person, I want them to be a self-starter. I can't inaudible company of 850 employees, we can't be attracting everybody and trying to get them motivated to come to work. To be a self-starter, visit with your colleagues, with your managers, really help drive the work that you're doing. Don't just sit around and wait for work to come to you. Get out there, communicate with them. Ingenuity and integrity. I want you all to stand behind your work, be very good at communicating and whatnot with your colleagues. Have some new ideas that we may not have been thinking about. Bring those to the table, but also, if you have a problem, come with a couple of solutions. Don't just come to me with a problem because it's just going to get added to the list. Right?

00:15:17 KC Yost
Right.

00:15:17 Noah Dyer
Then have a willingness to learn. I mean, that's really at the end of the day, what we're doing. The journey starts now. It's not, you've been on a journey to this point, but it's a different chapter now, and now you're really starting your career journey. Take everything that you've learned, all those tools that you've been given through whatever experiences you've had in the past, education-wise, and be ready to put them to work.

00:15:49 KC Yost
Part of the discussion I had with Hoyt, and what I'm hearing you say here is get in there with a good attitude and let's build a really solid foundation from which to grow.

00:16:01 Noah Dyer
That's right.

00:16:03 KC Yost
The old adage to my grandfather used to tell my dad, you got to start at the small end of the horn in order to come out the big end of the horn. My dad, the engineer/ musician playing a clarinet. You got to start in the small end of the horn. You've got to pay your dues. You've got to learn and absorb, and it's not necessarily glamorous work, but work that needs to be done. That's how you learn so you can advance. Right?

00:16:32 Noah Dyer
Right. That's exactly right. That's right.

00:16:34 KC Yost
Yeah, so what about someone with five years experience or even a senior-type guy?

00:16:41 Noah Dyer
I think actually the five-year experience guy, five to eight years, that's probably the most critical part of a healthy organization is to have a pretty good depth of those type of people. You don't want to have a lot of entry-level and a lot of senior-level people. That's not going to work, but as a five, eight-year guy, you're the chief cook and bottle washer, so to speak. I mean, you've got to be willing to do the entry-level work, but also, be looking for the opportunities to coach and mentor those guys, so guys and gals, so that they can advance in their career as well. I mean, you're training your replacement, so to speak, the guy that's going to come up. If you want to advance and become that next-level person, you've got to have folks that are going to take over those responsibilities. You got to be ready to jump when that opportunity presents itself, when you have the opportunity to take over and lead teams and maybe even some projects. That's what I look for in a five to eight-year range. I think that I hate to put a bracket around it on number of years of experience, but that's generally where we see people fall is when they get to that range that they're demonstrating those abilities to both, do the work and lead the work. From a senior project engineer, project manager perspective, be able to delegate. We are going to pile a lot of work on you, and you're going to have to be able to delegate that to others, but you retain the responsibility for delivering that product so you're not off the hook. Don't send it to somebody else and think that it's done and somebody else's responsibility now. It's still your responsibility. You just have an extension of you doing it through somebody that you've delegated.

00:18:38 KC Yost
Some of the worst senior project managers are ones who are micro managers and don't know how to delegate.

00:18:44 Noah Dyer
That's exactly right. Actually, that's a recipe for disaster. That's where you see projects go downhill the quickest is by somebody who does not know how to delegate their responsibilities.

00:18:54 KC Yost
Sure, sure. Absolutely. Credentials. Credentials of an individual. You and I have talked over the years and over 20 years, I guess, what's more important to PMP or a PE or, I mean, to me, that goes toward attitude as well and initiative by the individual wanting to succeed and move ahead. The idea is either one of those shows that you want to add value to the company, which means that you, in fact, add value to your self-worth at the company, right?

00:19:38 Noah Dyer
That's correct.

00:19:40 KC Yost
When do you start looking for people with credentials, and does someone without credentials have a problem moving into those senior roles, or how do you approach that?

00:19:52 Noah Dyer
No, and I think maybe we've talked about this in the past, and I'll share it with anybody that asks. I don't think having a PE makes you an engineer any more than I think having a PMP makes you a project manager. For the ones that I tell, I tell that, and they're still listening. I tell them, bring their learnings, their studies, experiences, things that got them to that point, just because you have a credential, you don't have a credential, doesn't matter. I'm looking at the body of work that's coming behind it. What is your aptitude to move to that next level? I can make you an engineer. I can make you a project manager, but you've got to have the drive to get you there. You've got to have the tools, the background to get you there. It's not going to happen day number three, when you get to the company, not going to elevate to some position that allows you to get a PE or PMP. They have time requirements almost for a reason so that you get experience, get that under your belt so that you're qualified to do the work. I've hired plenty of folks to be project managers that aren't PMPs. I've hired lots of guys over my career, worked with a lot of guys over my career that don't have a PE, but are better engineers than some engineers that have PE, so it's just a credential at the end of the day. It's helpful when you're looking at it on a resume, but I'm not a big fan of resumes either. I like to talk to the individual and get a good feeling of what they're capable of doing and where their drive is, what motivates them to get out of bed every morning.

00:21:40 KC Yost
Ah, makes perfect sense. Makes perfect sense. Beyond the fact that all states require third-party consultants like your company to have a PE registered in that state as the engineering responsible charge, otherwise, not necessarily what you consider an important factor in whether a guy's a good project manager or not.

00:22:07 Noah Dyer
That's correct. Yes. Yeah, you need to have that qualification. It certifies that you are capable of doing it, doesn't mean that you're necessarily doing it as a full-time profession, but definitely qualifies you to do the work.

00:22:31 KC Yost
Yeah, I got you. I got you. Absolutely. The age-old question that I love asking. What's more important, the PE or the PMP? I think your answer is neither really.

00:22:45 Noah Dyer
Neither really, but there is a reason that PE is in front of PMP in my signature line. I think that the PE, fundamentally, it really has set me up to be the person I am today. I think if I only had the opportunity to go after one or the other, I would go to the PE. I think that it's added a lot more value to my career than the PMP, but both are very important and very important to the individual who's, depending on what career path they want to pursue.

00:23:21 KC Yost
I got you. Understood, understood. We talked, and you've touched on this some, but let's drill down a little bit and talk about the hiring process that you guys go through in picking up engineers. Now, you've done a world tour, haven't you gone to twenty-some-odd campuses, or had people gone to go to twenty-some-odd campuses for recruiting, and that's the start the process and getting people in as interns?

00:23:49 Noah Dyer
That's correct. Yeah, so we do have an internship program that we promote. We've been doing for the past two years with great success. It all starts with going to, not necessarily just career fairs at universities, but maybe career fairs at community centers and things like that. I really want to promote that next level, next wave of Percheron employees, make sure that we're continuing to build for the future and not to stay idle where we are. We do have internships, like I said, that are available that we'll be getting those posted here pretty soon. Anybody who's interested in that can reach out, look out on the website, apply for any position that says internship, and we'll have somebody get in touch with you. The mentorship program for the new to industry in particular is pretty robust and documented. We try to deploy that when we get somebody who's new to industry, it doesn't matter, like I said, if they're coming out of college or if they're coming straight out of another industry that has relevant experience, but just to try to get them up to speed. Really, the mentorship program's going to have a huge bearing on where it goes based on the mentee and the mentee's way that they drive it. For anybody that is looking for an opportunity to be able to join Percheron and really move through their career if they want to. It can be as formal, as informal as they want to be. We have resources that are more than happy to sit down with them and help them through that. For myself, I enjoy just meeting people and talking to them about their careers and where they want to be, what they want to do, what inspires them to get out of bed in the morning and go to work, and then we can kind of pair that up with what we have available and see if it's something that's a good fit for both Percheron and the individual.

00:26:13 KC Yost
Yeah, it's very similar to what I used to do. I enjoyed having initial evaluators talk with the prospective hire right up front and me sit in the back of the room and just kind of watch their mannerisms and how their voice genuflected and their mannerism, kind of looking at the soft skills and see how intense they were on some subjects and interested in other subjects and that type of thing. I preferred looking at the soft skills and let someone else work about the technical level of ability and sounds very similar to what you're doing.

00:26:59 Noah Dyer
I mean, most of our departments and sub-departments, they have their own hiring managers. They're people that drive the deliverables and the product that comes out of that. Ultimately, they're the ones that are responsible for hiring the person. I don't typically participate in the direct process unless I'm invited to, like you said, to sit on an interview panel or something and just add some guidance to the whole process as opposed to being that person that's going to be the direct hire for that manager.

00:27:40 KC Yost
Oh, gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. Well, we're running out of time, so just want to-

00:27:45 Noah Dyer
inaudible.

00:27:45 KC Yost
I just want to-

00:27:50 Noah Dyer
inaudible.

00:27:50 KC Yost
Beg your pardon?

00:27:52 Noah Dyer
Time flies when you're having fun.

00:27:54 KC Yost
Oh, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. I just want to check, is there anything else that you want to add to talk about for perspective engineers out there and what they can do as far as trying to get a job with Percheron or any of the other consulting firms out there?

00:28:15 Noah Dyer
I think for an entry-level person, just come in with an open mind. I don't think that you're going to be CEO day two. That's not a realistic goal or anything. I would think of where you want to be in one year, three years, five years, what do you want to be doing at that point in time? Have that ready to go when you come to talk to somebody. Keep an open mind. We do a lot of different things. Our company as a whole is changing all the time. We are in different industry events. Things change at breakneck pace. We want you to be flexible, be willing to share your past experiences and see how we can relate them to what we're trying to drive as far as our vision and objectives.

00:29:13 KC Yost
Be patient.

00:29:14 Noah Dyer
Be patient.

00:29:16 KC Yost
Don't expect instant gratification.

00:29:19 Noah Dyer
No.

00:29:21 KC Yost
You've got to build that solid foundation in order to grow from that point. Right?

00:29:29 Noah Dyer
Agreed. Agreed.

00:29:31 KC Yost
Yeah. It's finding those who can be patient and have the right attitude are tough to find.

00:29:43 Noah Dyer
They're hard to find, but they are out there, and we do have several of them. If you want to join the team, by all means, let's give it a look and see where we can add value in each other's lives.

00:29:58 KC Yost
Excellent, excellent, excellent. Well, Noah, thanks for taking the time to visit. I enjoyed the conversation.

00:30:05 Noah Dyer
Thank you, KC, for inviting me on here. This was great.

00:30:08 KC Yost
We almost talked as if we'd known each other for over 20 years.

00:30:14 Noah Dyer
Just another conversation in the office. That's all.

00:30:16 KC Yost
Yeah. There you go, buddy. There you go. There you go. So if anyone would like to learn more about Percheron and opportunities for engineers as a consultant, you can find them on the web at percheronllc.com. That's Percheron, like the horse, LLC. com. Thanks to all of you for tuning into this episode of The Energy Pipeline Podcast, sponsored by Caterpillar Oil and Gas. If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for podcast topics, feel free to email me at kc.yost@oggn.com. I also want to thank my producer, Anastasia Willisan-Duff and everyone at the Oil and Gas Global Network for making this podcast possible. Find out more about other OGGN podcasts at oggn.com. This is KC Yost saying goodbye for now. Have a great week to keep that energy flowing through the pipeline.

00:31:11 Speaker 5
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