Growing while learning to champion the energy future
Keen to be part of the thriving energy sector in Malaysia, Bryan sought a role in Shell, a company that he believed would give him the best opportunities to learn and grow. Five years into the company, he is at the forefront of Shell’s energy transition efforts, advocating to customers the ways in which they can benefit from and transition to new energy solutions.
When Bryan was offered a role at Shell in 2018, he had no second thoughts about seizing the opportunity. Coming off a six-month-long internship honing his skills with an energy company in Kuala Lumpur, joining one of the leading global energy sector companies would not only be a career-defining move, but a chance to work towards a larger energy transition goal.
Armed with a degree in business administration, Bryan joined the Customer Operations business starting his Shell journey by learning to deliver frontline support to lubricant sales in Singapore.
Five years into the organisation, Bryan has had the opportunity to pursue multiple roles within the Customer Operations business. He started off as an Order to Cash frontliner dealing directly with customers. This was followed by a Deal to Cash role where he learnt to service the entire customer journey from set up, invoicing, customer master data to pricing and contracts after which he moved to a Deal Management supporting account managers. These roles, he says, allowed him to expand his knowledge of the energy sector in a more rounded fashion. Today, he is the customer success lead handling the growing lubricant business in Singapore and Hong Kong, a role in which he enables his team to place and monitor customer’s orders, manage multiple stakeholders and deal with customer queries which are often unpredictable.
While tackling unpredictability every day may not be for everyone, it’s what excites Bryan the most about his role. “You could be managing anything from a customer issue to a stock shortfall to a pricing issue. You can seldom foresee what is coming your way and each time you face a new challenge you get to engage with stakeholders across the value chain and learn something new,” he says.
Building these relations with the customers on a day-to-day basis, Bryan says, helps create an active feedback loop which can be analysed, turned into valuable data and insights and contribute to creating new energy solutions that can be adopted more easily on the ground.
This facet of his role that champions Shell’s energy transition efforts to the customers he interacts with, Bryan says, brings him a sense of fulfilment. “All of us can do our bit to facilitate the energy transition,” he says. “In my current role, I get to make a direct contribution by explaining to customers various ways in which they can benefit from energy transition and advocating shifting to energy-saving products and solutions .” These efforts, Bryan believes, will go a long way in building trust in energy products that are more efficient and help newer solutions emerge.
While interviewing for the role, Bryan says, he could foresee that his journey with Shell would bring him immense growth and learning. Five years later, he finds himself fully immersed in Shell’s culture of continuous learning and growth. “The learning for me has never stopped, I still feel like a newbie,” he says.
“There are people with decades of experience always willing to help you develop as a professional. I get to collaborate with colleagues from around the world from Singapore to India to Poland and they are all eager to share their knowledge and learnings. In addition, there are various structured projects and initiatives to engage, upskill and develop talent.” What he appreciates even more, he says, is that the opportunities are up for anyone to grab, regardless of how new they are to the sector, the role, or the company.
Currently, Bryan’s focus lies on making the most of the growth opportunities available to him within the Customer Operations business. In the near future, however, he hopes to take on initiatives that will contribute a lot more to the energy transition. “Shell is a robust organisation focused on developing new energy solutions and achieving net-zero emission goals. Even in the lubricants space that I currently work with, for example, the company has introduced several carbon-neutral products like the Shell Helix Ultra series, that show its commitment to transformation by helping customers reduce their carbon footprint,” he says. “I want to learn, grow and play a bigger role in energy transition efforts.”