“Did you see that Exxon has a recruitment sign on their stand?” somebody told me at the IMAGE Conference last week. It was a very telling remark, a remark that says a lot about the current job market for geoscientists working in the energy sector in the US. One glimmer of hope in an overall picture of job uncertainty.
Only this week, ConocoPhillips announced that it is planning to slash 20 to 25% of its workforce, citing higher operational costs as one of the main reasons.
And Conoco’s decision does not stand on its own. Both operators and service companies made a lot of folk redundant in recent months, as I have been told through talking to people. Apart from higher operational costs and lower oil prices, there are other reasons for the cuts that have been made.
Company mergers is one of those. These things are never good news for workers, and Chevron’s layoffs following the merger with Hess is probably the best example of that.
Outsourcing of geoscience work to low-income countries is another factor that has not helped create job opportunities for geoscientists in the US and also to an extent in Europe. I heard a geologist say that he is now in calls with India on a daily basis to help find additional barrels in the North Sea. It is a movement that you don’t often hear about, but it must have a detrimental effect on what is on offer for graduates in the West.
If you superimpose all these “threats” to job opportunities, is it a wonder that people who are in a nice role with one of the large operators feel uneasy about their prospects for the future? No, and Samuel Price worded it very well in a post on LinkedIn this week when he said:
“The expectation of a vibrant, thirty-year career across multiple continents is gone. Surviving the next reorganisation is all my generation looks forward to, and these “reorgs” have begun accelerating. Many of my former colleagues have already left, and many are considering leaving. This is not a problem unique to Shell. Oil and gas, an industry with a history of cyclic booms and busts, had never fully learned to think ahead. Like any publicly traded company, investors and bigwigs stare at share price and think in quarterly earnings. This does not foster a stable work environment.”
For me, who is following the job market with interest, just because I’m following the industry closely, this comment says a lot. It says that the industry in the West is changing big time, and not only in the short term as a response to oil price fluctuations.
Another observation that says a lot about the longer term opportunities comes from Sidsel Lindsø in Norway. She has been posting multiple times about the fact that the exploration community in Norway has shrunk so much over the years. This is not only a reflection of companies merging, but also of there being a smaller hopper of prospects to go for. It is all a sign that the industry is slowly declining, maintaining production mainly through technology and near-field exploration, and not through finding new frontier barrels.
But there are regions where the picture is very different. In the Middle East, recruitment of G&G folk has been much more steady recently, as someone with knowledge on the matter told me this week. “Aramco has been somewhat slower but the region is booming with lots of projects. We onboarded hundreds of people during the first six months of the year and now are bringing people for another client, with tens of G&G specialists. In addition, ADNOC, QATAR Energy, KOC are still looking for a lot of G&G support.”
These observations leave me with two questions; how many of those losing their oil and gas geoscience jobs in the West are picking up positions in the Middle East? And does this reflect a longer-term shift of where the oil is being produced? Time will all tell, and as Samuel Price already indicated in his LinkedIn post, it’s just an observation from one individual. But these are interesting observations and food for thought nonetheless.
POST SCRIPT: I have had some feedback from readers, primarily through LinkedIn, arguing that job opportunities for G&G specialists from the West are rather limited in the Middle East. Instead, people are primarily being recruited from lower-income countries. So, while companies may be hiring in places, this does not mean that there will be lots of opportunities experienced people who lost their jobs in the US or in Europe.
