Abstract
The purpose of this article is to discuss professional education and training programs offered to teams of operators by the main company in the area of Bacia de Campos (Petrobras), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It also discusses the necessary skills to the new functions derived from the implementation of an organizational innovation, the polyvalence, and how such innovation has impacted operators’ activity. By using elements of WEA and the device “Meetings on the Work” it was possible to gain a better understanding of both the distance between the dimensions of prescribed work and real work, and the articulation between outsourcing and the proposition of polyvalence, which have stimulated the creation of new functions, namely, the polyvalent operator and the operator-maintainer, this latter being in fact an evolvement of the first.