A bp alumnus told us recently about stepping into boardrooms at large global firms for the first time since leaving. They kept finding themselves a step ahead of the room, and they put it down to one thing: the sheer density of sharp, capable people bp had surrounded them with for years.
We hear a version of that story a lot. Someone spends decades at bp, moves on or retires, and then, a year or two later, tells us the same thing: it was only once they were sitting in other rooms, at other companies, that they realised quite how good the training ground had been.
By the training ground, they mean the people. Another put it more bluntly: everyone they’d worked with at bp had been the top person in their year, at their school, wherever they grew up, in the UK or beyond. bp was simply where all of those people ended up in one place. You can spend twenty years surrounded by that calibre of colleague without particularly noticing it. It becomes your normal.
It’s an interesting counterpoint to how bp sometimes gets talked about outside the business. From where we sit, working with several hundred bp families, the pattern holds up: the quality of the people, and the standard that sets, tends to be what people miss most once they’ve left.
There’s a fairly ordinary explanation for it too. Few employers offer the breadth bp does. In a single career, people move between trading, engineering, projects, legal and finance, often across several countries. Careers built that way take longer, and the benefit is hard to see from the inside. It tends to show up afterwards, when you’re measured alongside people who came up a narrower, faster route somewhere else.
So whether you’re still at bp or a few years out, count it properly. The pension, the shares and the CV line are the assets everyone can see. The standard you were trained to is another one, and it belongs in the conversation when you’re weighing up your next move, whatever that looks like.
If you’ve had a “didn’t realise how good I had it” moment yourself, or you’re wondering how your own next step stacks up financially, we’d love to hear about it.
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While we have extensive experience helping bp employees and alumni optimise their benefits, Emery Little operates independently and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the bp group, including BP Pension Trustees Limited, on behalf of the BP Pension Fund. This allows us to provide objective, independent guidance focused solely on your best interests.
