Oil Industry Faces
Unexpected Skill Shortage
Oil companies are increasingly relying
on things like cloud computing and
Internet of Things to stay ahead of the
competition. This means they need
more and more software engineers
to keep the whole thing going, writes
energy industry analyst Mark Venables
in a story for Forbes.
Because of the nature of the oil and
gas business, the rush to adopt cloud
solutions, IoT connectedness, and
machine learning is understandable.
Managing hundreds of wells across
hundreds of acres, monitoring well
flows and predicting well perfor-
mance are just a few examples of how
instrumental digital technology has
become for the fossil fuels industry. It
saves money, it boosts efficiency, and
it makes work in the field and on the
platforms safer.
Yet all this monitoring, managing, and
predicting require human talent. Soft-
ware engineering talent, to be pre-
cise. The more sensors you have, the
more devices you connect to an IoT
network, the more data you generate.
This data then needs to be analyzed
to be of any use. Since artificial intel-
ligence capable of doing this is yet to
come, human talent is essential.
Venables quotes Huw Rothwell from
oil and gas recruitment firm Petroplan
as saying that there is growing de-
mand for people with the knowledge
and expertise in software engineering
for the energy industry. Satisfying this
demand will likely become a chal-
lenge as the talent shortage in energy
is only part of a wider talent shortage
in a world bent on becoming as con-
nected as possible.
The engineering shortage is not new:
a 2017 white paper from Experis Engi-
neering noted engineering positions
have been among the hardest to fill
in the United States for nine years in
a row. Globally, engineering positions
are the fourth-hardest to fill. Now
zoom in on software engineers, who
are bound to be at the top of list of
engineers most in demand.
What makes the shortage problem
worse is that, as is the case with pret-
ty much any other talent, it’s not so
much about quantity as it is about
quality. The oil and gas industry needs
quality software engineering talent
and it needs it fast. Recent Forrester
research suggests that companies
that have been slow in attracting the
right engineering talent risk having to
pay up to 20 percent above-market
salaries. This would only add to a
swelling bill for E&Ps as oilfield service
providers are also raising their rates
amid improving market conditions.
The Expert’s report identified five key
challenges companies needing to
hire engineers encounter. These in-
clude lack of experience as number
one, lack of hard job and technical
skills, too-high salary demands, lack
of soft skills, and lack of formal engi-
neering educations. Each of these is
tough enough on its own. Taken to-
gether, they suggest the talent short-
age problem will only become worse
in the future.
By Irina Slav via Oilprice.com
VOLUME
A
utomation, data analytics,
the Internet of Things - you
name it, the oil industry
wants it. In the new post-crisis,
efficiency-driven
industry,
the
adoption of digital technology has
really flourished, and, as so often
happens, now this fast-growing
adoption is creating a shortage; a
talent shortage, for a change.
9