Amelia Nelson, Noble: Soft skills just as crucial as technical knowledge for successful career

By Stephen Whitfield, Senior Editor

Any young professional looking to make their way in oil and gas must answer some key questions for themselves. For example, do you want a more technical career, or do you envision yourself in management? Do you have the soft skills needed to work collaboratively with people? If you strive to become a leader, what kind of leader do you want to be?

Through her work with the IADC Young Professionals (YP) Committee, which she currently chairs, Amelia Nelson strives to provide YPs like herself with the resources to answer those kinds of questions.

“The kinds of events we’re hosting through the YP Committee are aimed at helping them to figure out what they’re good at and then build some of those soft skills, like working with people and speaking in front of people,” she said. “That is all just as important as the technical knowledge.”

Mrs Nelson, a Rig Manager at Noble Corp, had not envisioned a career path in oil and gas while growing up in Dallas, Texas. While planning to attend Texas A&M University, her sight was initially set on studying nutritional science, before deciding to switch to ocean engineering because she wanted to work offshore.

Even then, oil and gas was not top of mind as a primary career goal. However, as she continued her studies, she found offshore oil and gas to be a good fit for what she wanted to do, because it combined the technical aspect of her ocean engineering major – the mechanical and fluid dynamics involved in drilling a well – with the operational aspect of managing an offshore facility.

In June 2017 – one month after earning a master’s degree in ocean engineering – she joined Diamond Offshore’s Operations Development Training Program. “I didn’t have that much background in oil and gas before going offshore… but there was so much to take in and learn. It was both intimidating and exciting,” she said.

From there, Mrs Nelson’s path began to solidify. The five-year training program aimed to groom participants for an office-based management position, and it put her through rotations of three-week hitches on Diamond’s rigs where she learned about almost every role on the rig.

She acknowledged that, as someone with nearly zero drilling experience at the time, the technical learning curve was fairly steep. On top of that, the program also challenged her soft skills in terms of needing to work with people of different backgrounds and different levels of experience.

In the end, however, she found the program to be invaluable in terms of learning about the ins and outs of rig operations, as well as how rig crews function as a unit.

All the skills gained during that initial training program have been useful in the years since as Mrs Nelson progressed through her career. After two years, the company put her in an Operations Engineer role in 2019, then the following year as an Assistant Rig Manager for the Ocean BlackLion drillship. She continued in that latter role even after Noble Corp acquired Diamond in September 2024, eventually being named Rig Manager for the Noble BlackHornet drillship in November 2025.

As Rig Manager, Mrs Nelson said she estimates that around 75% of her job calls for soft skills, rather than technical skills. These skills are critical, for example, when conducting daily meetings with the operator representative, or when serving as a liaison between the rig crew and Noble’s back office.

“We have experts on BOP, so if we have a problem with that, we can ask them questions. We have people on the maintenance side who are meant to be resources for you. So, really, what we’re doing in our position is managing people instead of managing the equipment,” she said.

Outside her day job, Mrs Nelson also became active with IADC in 2021, when she joined the IADC YP Committee at the recommendation of Diamond Offshore’s then-VP of Operations. She became actively involved with the committee, eventually volunteering to chair the 2025 IADC Young Professionals Summit.

“With the summit, we’re really trying to hone in on what do young professionals want to hear? They want to grow their personal brand. They want to know the steps they need to take if they’re considering furthering their education, or if they want to go directly in the field. How do you balance your work and home life? The summit is a good way to hear all of these perspectives,” she said. This year’s YP Summit is scheduled for 24 September, to be hosted at Noble’s Houston office.

In January, Mrs Nelson took over as Chair of the YP Committee for 2026-2027. She said she hopes to maintain the momentum that the group has built over the past few years, building on the work that previous chairs have done to get the committee off the ground. Her main priority right now is bolstering member participation in events, through direct inquiries to YPs and through the companies that are sponsoring the committee this year. DC