Sunday, April 27, 2008

Insufficients New Graduates in the Oil Industry

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the AIPN (Association of International Petroleum Negotiators) conference held in Bapstrop (30 mins from Austin). Every single presentation was very interesting, and particularly one surprised me a lot: Lack of Graduates in the Oil Industry.

Karl McGarvey, Boyden employee, presented the current situation of the Oil Industry. 73% of the people working nowadays is older than 40 years old, and 50% of this group is older than 55 years old. This means that there is a lack of young professionals, and, therefore, future directors are going to be younger than today's.

Also Mr. McGarvey mentioned that according to the surveys, generations between ´77-´94 are orientated to Team Working, Techno-Savvies, Proactive, looking for Instant Gratification, and Working to live.

As consequences, it is thought that salaries and compensation for young professional may increase, trainee programs are going to be a key factor to develop the future directors for the companies.

3 comments:

Ben Jones said...

I've seen similar statistics, and its become apparent from energy company's recruiting techniques that they are keenly aware of the bind they will soon find themselves. Interestingly, a company's foray into alternative energy has become a point of differentiation and a potential competitve advantage in recruiting engineering and managerial talent. Young people are often excited to know they have the opportunity to work on the cutting edge of technological and societal issues. For these reasons, energy companies such as BP, Shell, and Chevron are highlighting their involvement with alternative energy programs during their recruiting process. With fewer college engineering graduates and a soon-to-be massive shortfall in personnel at large energy companies, the move to alternative energy has, at least for some companies, become a necessity to ensure they have ample access to hiring engineers and managers.

Nick Flores said...

I think that this is a pretty interesting article and we can probably dig a little deeper with it. I worked for the oil and gas arm of a big "energy" company last summer, and this generation gap was very apparent in my work. In fact, we even had meetings about it. Managers openly discussed the fact that the work force was growing older and was about to retire, and they were actually expressing the need not only for recent graduates, but also middle-aged engineers who had experience. I think that some of the companies might be a little worried about the lack of experience coming up the pipeline, if you will.

The second interesting portion I found was the fact that many of the big oil and gas companies are attempting to rebrand themselves as "energy" companies. I think this is a smart tactic, because more and more I think the engineers are going to learn that oil and gas might not necessarily be at the top of the heap forever. Instead, we engineers are learning about newer and cleaner fuels, and we are excited about being part of a new movement. Maybe the companies realize that they need to keep up with the movement and actually make a play toward the new technology. And like was talked about in class earlier this week, maybe when some new energy technology is ready to overtake our old oil and gas resources, ExxonMobil might just bully its way to the front of the line with a huge wad of cash.

Nilou said...

I already have seen the wave of very young engineering especially women working in managerial positions. When I first was going to work at Exxonmobil I went there with the mind set that I will be working for a very old guy around very old people. Interestingly I got to work with a lot of young engineers. My supervisor was only may be 40 years old. At the time there one of young ladies I knew from society of women engineers became supervisor and the trends of meeting young supervisors continued as I spent 4 months at ExxonMobil. And then of course they pay big bucks even to us (interns) to persuade us to go work for them and they openly expressed this intention many times!!!!