Future Skills
The Brief
Give 80,000 people a reason to build the skills their company needs to survive
BP was reinventing itself from an oil and gas company into an integrated energy business with a net-zero target by 2050. That transformation required 80,000 employees to build capability across five newly defined skills: agility, commercial, digital, human, and sustainability. A skills framework without emotional buy-in is just a document. BP needed people to care about their own development — and see it as their own.
The Solution
Five skills. Five brands. One identity designed to last four years
A visual identity system giving each of BP’s five future skills its own distinct brand — a vibrant, recognisable symbol built to flow through everything from launch animations to internal comms over a four-year programme. Paired with a stirring workforce narrative and a launch animation deployed to all 80,000 employees during BP’s Growth Week.
Net zero by 2050. Without new skills, a promise nobody can deliver.
BP was reinventing itself — transforming from an oil and gas company into an integrated energy business determined to reach net zero by 2050. To get there, the company needed to build internal capability across five key skills while fostering a growth mindset across the entire workforce.
The firm needed a visual identity and narrative to launch these future skills to the organisation — communicating what they are, why they matter, and why employees should care about their own personal development. The audience was global: 80,000 employees across every function, market, and seniority level.
Whatever we created needed to resonate universally and last for years, not weeks. A skills framework is only as powerful as the belief people have in it — and belief has to be earned through work that feels genuine, not corporate.
Future Skills — Growth Week Launch
Our Approach
Listen to the workforce first. Then build something that lasts
We ran focus groups with BP employees worldwide, exploring what each future skill meant to them personally and how it connected to their own career journeys. These insights shaped the narrative — a stirring call to arms that connected organisational transformation to individual growth.
We designed a visual identity for each skill — simple, recognisable, and cohesive. Each is a brand in its own right: a vibrant symbol that holds the meaning of that particular skill. Together they form a collective identity and a sustainable design system built with purpose and longevity in mind.
The launch animation debuted during BP’s Growth Week to all 80,000 employees — an arresting piece that empowered people with the know-how to make positive change. The identity was designed to flow through everything relating to future skills within and outside BP over the following four years.
The Journey
Key Project Assets
Five-Skill Visual Identity System
A cohesive design system giving each of BP’s five future skills its own vibrant brand — built for longevity, flexibility, and global recognition across a four-year programme.
Growth Week Launch Animation
A stirring motion piece launching the five future skills to 80,000 employees — connecting organisational transformation to individual growth with energy and conviction.
Sustainable Design System
A flexible identity framework designed to flow through all future skills communications, training materials, and campaign assets over a four-year programme.
Five Skill Story Films
A targeted story film for each of the five future skills — building on the launch identity to go deeper into each capability, finding the human truth inside each one and making it personally relevant to every leader watching.
Impact
The identity gave BP’s transformation a visual language that connected net-zero ambition to individual capability — launched to the entire organisation in a single week.
The launch worked. So BP asked us to go deeper.
Growth Week got 80,000 people through the door. What it couldn’t do was take each of them through it differently. So BP came back with five new briefs — one per skill. Targeted story films that moved beyond the launch and into the specific human territory of each capability: what agility actually asks of you, what commercial thinking looks like when the stakes are real, what it means to build digital confidence when the technology keeps changing.
Each film was built on the identity we’d already created — same visual language, same emotional register — but told its own distinct story. Five skills, five films, one consistent world.
The brief for each was the same: don’t explain the skill, embody it. Find the human truth inside each capability and make it feel personally relevant to the person watching. Not a training module. Not a how-to. A story that makes the skill worth pursuing — because you can see yourself in it.
The result was a story-led curriculum with the depth to sit alongside the identity for years. Five skills. Five stories. One world, built to last.
Future Skills — Digital Skill Story
Project Insights
From corporate strategy to personal growth
A net-zero target is an organisational ambition. Five future skills are a personal invitation. The difference between the two is whether people feel the transformation is something happening to them or something they’re part of. We built an identity that made it the latter — rooted in what employees themselves told us the skills meant to them.
Five symbols. One narrative. Eighty thousand people who now have a visual language for the skills their company — and their careers — need to survive. Sometimes the most powerful brand isn’t a logo. It’s a reason to grow.
You guys go into the true art of the possible and really push your creativity. I think you guys do things better than anyone else.
Ameet Thakkar, Vice President Future Skills & Learning — BP
