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Pierre DUCHET-SUCHAUX
French citizen
Exploration & Production Branch, Paris,
France. Process Simulation Manager.
Chemical Engineering degrees from Ecole
Centrale de Paris, then ENSPM.
Has been with the Group for 24 years, in
a series of engineering jobs at Exploration
& Production, including a three-year
spell in Aberdeen, Scotland.
I finished school and did my National Service
in the Central African Republic. Back in
France, I started working for a small petroleum-engineering
company. Everything was fine until I developed
Leber’s optic atrophy, an affection
of the optic nerve, and lost my eyesight
in a matter of months. I’ve been blind
since.
Disabilities and
job hunting.
The small company I was working for couldn’t
keep me on. It was hard for a few months,
but then I pulled myself together and focused
on finding a new job, with a lot of help
from my family, friends and acquaintances.
I got in touch with the oil companies. I
obviously mentioned my handicap on my CV,
but made sure the people reading it saw
there was more to me than that. I don’t
think that outfitting a work station is
a big problem for a large company, because
they focus on a candidate’s potential.
As an aside, Total and Elf offered me virtually
the same job within days. I took Total’s
offer.
Total was hiring lots of young engineers
back in the 1980s. I was 27 years old and
didn’t have any particular problems
fitting in with my colleagues, who were
young too. Especially as my boss at the
time was realistic about my handicap and
figured I would take the better part of
a year to be fully operational.
Evolving slower,
but surely.
Looking back, I have to say that my career
development has been consistent, even if
probably slower than average. Of course,
my handicap got in the way of my prospects,
as I had to prove myself every time I changed
teams or bosses.
But I think it’s up to me to show
others that I can live and work just like
anybody else. Integrating a disabled person
is not so much of a structural problem.
Total has never made an issue of paying
for outfitting a work station. It’s
about changing attitudes.
Mobility is possible.
That didn’t stop me being expatriated
to Aberdeen, Scotland, with the Process
Department. I was married and had children,
and everybody was happy to come along. But
it wasn’t easy; there was some foot-dragging,
especially on the British side. Until a
final nudge from my boss at the time got
things moving and off I went. There, again,
I had to persuade them that I had something
valuable to contribute – just like
any other expatriate, I’d say. As
I was talking about attitudes, however,
I would like to point out that the British
are a little more comfortable with handicaps
than the French. That experience lasted
over three years.
I probably didn’t get as much international-mobility
experience as I would have liked to. In
Exploration & Production, expatriation
was pretty much a compulsory step in every
engineer’s career; it helped your
prospects. That’s not so much the
case today: now you can be a specialist
at Total even if you spend your whole career
at HQ.
If I had to talk to young people wanting
to join the company (disabled or otherwise,
because I don’t believe in reserved
seats: I believe in team integration), I
would have no problems telling them that
the oil business has exciting days ahead
of it. From the outside, it may look like
an aging industry, but we actually deal
with absolutely exhilarating technological
and economic challenges every day.
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