Technical Report Writing Skills for Engineers and Scientists in Nigerian Petroleum Industry Organisations

This study assesses technical report writing skills among engineers and scientists working in Nigerian petroleum industry organisations and evaluates the professional development interventions most effective in improving technical writing quality. The Nigerian petroleum sector employs tens of thousands of technical professionals whose work generates continuous documentation requirements including well reports, environmental impact assessments, safety incident reports, and technical feasibility studies. The quality of this documentation has significant operational, regulatory, and safety implications. The study draws on a mixed-methods design, analysing a sample of 80 technical reports from petroleum industry professionals in Port Harcourt, Lagos, and Warri, applying a technical writing quality rubric covering accuracy, conciseness, visual data presentation, audience adaptation, and adherence to international technical reporting standards. Supplementary data were collected through structured interviews with 25 technical communication managers and training coordinators in five major petroleum sector organisations. Findings indicate that the most consistent technical writing weaknesses among Nigerian petroleum industry professionals include verbose sentence construction, poor executive summary and abstract construction, unclear recommendations sections, and inadequate integration of tables and figures into the written narrative. Experience level correlates significantly with report quality for professionals with post-qualification writing mentorship, but not for those who have received only generic writing training. Recommendations include the development of petroleum industry-specific technical writing programmes delivered in partnership with the Petroleum Training Institute. Keywords: technical writing, petroleum industry, professional development, report writing, Nigeria.