Instrumentation and control engineering - Chevening leadership essay

Hi All,
I'm applying for the chevening scholar ship, Would you please review my essay and any comments are welcome,

determined to accomplish the tasks

I started my career in the field of Instrumentation and control engineering 22 years ago. I joined Sirte Oil Company as an Instrumentation technician, I gained a valuable technical experience of 11 years that given the opportunity to move to the German oil company ( WINTERSHALL ) who has been working in Libya since 1958.

In 2102 I was promoted to the Instrumentation Senior Supervisor position, my new role was to lead a team of 8 multinational instrumentation engineers. Leading and being in this team means carrying loads of additional tasks and a huge responsibility, we were responsible for carrying out all routine and non-routine work orders at our Jakhira oil production facilities which includes the gas plant, gas oil separation plant and the salt water disposal plant.

In 2012 the company planned to perform an overhaul works for our gas utilization plant the next year 2013, I was appointed for the planning and the preparation for this project for the instrumentation and control department side. Some members of the team were young local engineers and they were worried that they had never been involved in such a project, I gathered the team into several meetings to make sure all team members are on the same page and I insisted to involve them thoroughly in an all tasks. By the end of the project our piece of work was chosen as the best prepared and planned of all other departments.

By mid of 2014 the company had to pause its operations and to evacuate all the foreigner expats for security reasons. All our multinational colleagues are not allowed by the company to return to field until now for the same reasons, this was a big challenge for me and for my Libyan team colleagues as we suffered from lack of manpower and experience, several meetings were held with the team to insure they still keep the positive spirit they gained from the old project.

In September 2016 the company decided to resume its production operations in Libya with only the local staff, In my opinion it was certain this will be a challenging project specially with 100% local staff of all departments. It took the staff only one week to resume production to the normal operation levels.

It was a hard times we have gone through with the unrest situation in the country, me and my team were determine to accomplish the tasks we were given and I am certain such challenges allowed me to sharpen my skills and exposed me to the information I would not have known before.

Hi Abdu.

I am in the same process as you are, so I am no expert. However, I have read a lot of essays and feedback in this forum and I recommend you do the same. It's really helpful.

So, having said that::
1. Don't repeat the information you have already said on your professional background and job duties. Delete the first paragraph, it is not necessary. Go straight to the point.

2. You have to really map out the Leadership and Influencing situation you are trying to tell. Right now from your essay, I understood you were part of a team, as you kept talking about WE.

3. I am sure if you lead the team through those difficult times, you had to take some measures to overcome them, right now, you are downplaying the challenges, and it is not helping your essay. You should better DESCRIBE the challenges, tell what STEPS you took to improve the situation, show a favorable OUTCOME.

4. As for influencing skills, read some essays and find common threads.

I really advise you to focus your essay on yourself, and not your coworkers, you have to sell your capabilities. This essay is not convincing of your skills and abilities.

Go back to the paper, and lay out what you want to say in each paragraph. Don't be too modest, we are competing with a lot of brilliant people!

I hope this helps! Good luck!

Abdussalam, contrary to the opinion above, you have a very strong leadership background in this essay. Do not change anything about it. Specifically, your first paragraph is of the utmost importance as it establishes that you have climbed the ranks of leadership in the company. That is extremely important to your narrative. Do not delete that part at all. There is no repetition of information because the second paragraph deals with your new position which is a step above your old position so it partially carries the first position title. Something that the poster did not understand since she is not a trained contributor of this forum. She is only an applicant for Chevening just like you are. So her advice is amateur and not based on proper information for application screening. Her advice is merely her understanding of the advice I have been giving the other applicants at this forum which in this case did not apply. All professional advice given by me on this forum are on a case to case basis, depending upon the proper review of the essay provided by the applicant. The advice I give is not one size fits all.

You exemplified your leadership roles in every instance quite well and showcased your leadership abilities in certain instances. The "We" reference in this instance is necessary as you were tasked to form the team that would be doing collaborative work. However, you also have references to "I" which helped to support the "we" stance in the essay as you asserted your leadership role in the group. The "we" only referred to the shared work responsibilities of the team so it isn't a big deal in your presentation.

Your essay needs to be improved in terms of influencing skills. Focus on the 2012-2013 project for your overall influencing discussion. How did you inspire the young engineers / team members to believe that they could perform the tasks required? Aside from having meetings and insisting they be involved in all the tasks, how did you handle certain situations that negatively affected the morale of the team? For example, if a major project was being done and one of the team members had a major failure that affected the performance of the rest of the team, how did you influence them to forget what happened, not blame the team member, and simply fix the situation as per your instructions and move on to do even better work as a collective group? Such instances would highlight a major influencing skill on your part.

I would like to thank all of you for your valuable comments , I really appreciate that.