In our increasingly dynamic world, Geoscientists must broaden from traditional skills to include knowledge of digital mindsets, new value streams, and applied engineering.  Likewise, it is imperative to promote skills in generating robust geologic frameworks, systematic hypothesis testing, and collaboration.  These cornerstone skills support data science by driving subsurface interpretation stability and ensuring deeper region domain knowledge; attributes that are essential to ensuring agility, ability to optimize, and innovation.  However, while Regional Geoscience has been vital for opportunity generation since the earliest hydrocarbon exploration days, industry has shifted focus to technology improvements at the cost of regional integration skills.  Furthermore, in academia, undergraduate field course requirements and graduate field mapping projects have dwindled.  Likewise, industry training emphasizes narrower, analog-based themes, such as in shallow-water reservoirs or contractional structures, and few, if any, concentrate on ways to systematically assemble regional observations into testable configurations.  Paradoxically, while regional framework skills are declining, the volume of subsurface information has increased to an unprecedented level, further eroding the ability to make sense of observations in meaningful ways at a time when the need for new insights is great. Given this state, skill growth must be prioritized, and training techniques modernized to meet current and future needs.

The best way to develop Regional Geoscience skills is to properly frame basin-to-region-scale problems and systematically test a variety of hypotheses.  This requires effective collaboration with common approaches to communicating out recommendations.  The key to greatly improving the effectiveness of organizational competencies is to establish common methods and shared technical quality expectations. One such method, Genetic Basin Analysis (S. May et al, 2010), organizes information across states of knowledge and scale with observations, physical models, and predicted extrapolations to systematically highlight first-order causal or correlative control geologic play distributions. In addition, the development of integrative, applied skills requires focused apprentice-style on-the-job coaching, reinforced by an immersive field ‘learning laboratory’ experiences to practice new skills in a psychologically safe setting.  This comprehensive training approach builds necessary skills in co-designing integrated map products, framing data analysis in a business context, and communicating complex systems knowledge to drive good decisions.  Moreover, students learn value of robust regional frameworks for exploratory analysis by experiencing it directly over hypothesis testing on concrete, easily observable geologic data.  Likewise, confidence develops from debating cross-functional context through the diversity of team perspectives.  This experience teaches students to understand basin-scale geologic systems in totality so that they can step beyond the analog approach, that while useful, does not provide the deeper understand that supports identifying and effectively communication emerging insights that can improve business performance.