With oil industry talent fired, what comes next?

Talk of a talent shortage when the oil industry is laying off workers enmasse may sound counterintuitive. However, a few years from now, the industry will recover, if its past cyclical boom-andbust nature is any guide.

And when that happens, the oil industry will have to hire again. But it may not find enough talent to fill in the gap.

According to Oilprice. com, some of the more than 100,000 workers laid off in the U.S. oil and gas industry in the past few months alone are likely to consider changing their career path - permanently. Tesla, for example, has plans to hire as many as 65,000 workers by the end of this year, and people are scrambling for any open spot in the attractive company.

Others who have been let go in the oil industry have simply retired.

This means that a whole new kind of talent will need to be tapped. Although it is unlikely that the same number of additional jobs will be needed again in the future, considering the increased automation in the industry, oil and gas companies will have to hire employees among the younger generations to fill the gap.

The young generations, however, are not particularly attracted to work in the fossil fuel industry because they see it as misaligned with their values of working for a social and environmental- conscious employer. Other employers and sectors don’t have the same problem.

The current crisis and the tens of thousands of layoffs every month since March are setting the stage for a massive talent shortage in just a few short years - but oil companies are not sitting idling by.

Despite cutting jobs enmasse, Big Oil is not giving up on internships as it looks to avoid repeating the mistakes it made during the previous downturns when it had to pay retirees to train the new recruits once prices and markets recovered.

Supermajors such as Chevron and BP are keeping their internships and university graduate recruitment efforts even though they are slashing around 15 per cent of their respective workforce, HR executives told The Wall Street Journal.

In Nigeria some of the oil companies that had already assembled teams for some of their projects had to disband them and those employees were asked to go because the chances of executing the projects for which they are assembled in the near future is highly remote.

According to Jeo Nwakwue, chairman, Society of Petroleum Engineers, Nigeria Council stated that many projects may have been sanctioned, may be those that would break

Prices in the region of $50 and $60 rate but they can no longer go forward, you cannot employ people for those projects. So it has had negative impact on the industry especially petroleum engineers.

If the outlook for the prices are not rosy, people may not be thinking that price of crude oil would recover in the near future because, he said.

In terms of growth we are in a turbulence period because at $45 nobody knows how long the price would be in this range. At this price many projects would not be economical and if they are not economical, you can’t hire and you can’t grow. So it is not good for Petroleum Engineers globally.