"Retention Is A Massive, Massive Problem" For Oil Majors; Gen Z Steering Clear, Enrollments Collapse

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And even if investors were interested in expanding drilling right away, many oil companies don’t have extra drilling equipment lying around ready to use, or extra people ready to operate it. Trained and knowledgeable workers are retiring or moving to other industries. The average oil and gas worker is 44 years old, a recent report from Deloitte found. The industry has mostly rehired the 15,000 workers it laid off during the 2020 crash, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Statistics. But the workforce numbers have been on a long downward trend since 2015, when oil prices took a plunge after a supply glut. The volatility of the industry — the cycle of laying off and hiring people — is another factor that makes the jobs unappealing, the Deloitte report said.

“Half of oil and gas professionals, I believe, would gladly leave the oil and gas industry tomorrow if they could get a renewable energy job,” said Dar-Lon Chang, who worked as an engineer at ExxonMobil for 16 years before resigning in 2019 over concerns about climate change. A recent global survey by AirSwift found that 82 percent of current oil and gas workers would consider switching to another energy sector in the next three years, up from 79 percent last year and 73 percent in 2020. Fifty-four percent of those thinking about leaving picked the renewable industry as a preferred destination. “Retention is a massive, massive problem,” Dennett said. “They’re losing their most expert, skilled, and experienced technicians, engineers, designers, operators, mechanics … I think they will be starved of new talent.”

When Big Oil comes up in the news, it’s usually something bad — oil spills, climate lawsuits, or other dirty business. The industry has drawn comparisons to Big Tobacco, and this image has started to affect workers. “We don’t want to be the bad guys,” said one anonymous participant in a study surveying oil workers’ opinions about climate change as part of a recent paper in the journal Energy Research and Social Science. +

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College students are also steering clear of petroleum engineering programs, creating a gap as oil companies look to replace retiring Baby Boomers. Over the last five years, the number of people graduating from petroleum engineering programs has dropped from 2,300 to around 400, an 83 percent plunge, according to statistics from Lloyd Heinze, a Texas Tech University professor. Schools in America’s oil patch, such as Louisiana State University and the University of Houston, are seeing drastic declines in enrollment in petroleum engineering, and others are beginning to shut down their programs: The University of Calgary in Canada and Imperial College London both pressed pause on their oil and gas engineering majors last year. The trend extends from fieldwork to the front office. From 2006 until 2020, the number of business school graduates who went into a career in the oil and gas industry fell by 40 percent, according to a survey of 3.5 million MBA students conducted by LinkedIn, while the number of students recruited into renewables rose.

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https://grist.org/energy/young-people-are-steering-clear-of-oil-jobs-retention-hiring/