What Skills are Useful for Continued Employment as a Geoscientist in the Petroleum Industry?

I find myself in a somewhat strange situation. I was “made redundant” (became unemployed) earlier this year when the company I worked for axed the research group I was in. That pushed me into early retirement mode. My retirement plans had always included rejoining the Academic world somehow, hoping to do a bit of teaching and research, but the teaching part was thrust upon me earlier than expected.

I now find myself filling some recently vacated shoes and teaching an advanced-level petroleum geology course. Hmmm. What do I tell the students about their career potential in that field? Prospects are definitely not good. But are there skills, tools, or other things I should emphasize to at least give them half a chance? I have my own thoughts, based on my experience. But my last posting was in Austin TX, not a lot of easy networking possibilities there to get the thoughts of other oil-patch folks, and a research group isn’t where most geos will end up.

So, I looked for help here on LinkedIn. I set up my first-ever online survey. I had some general thoughts about which skills or character traits might be worth including, but left an option for respondents to add their own thoughts. I also asked respondents to specify where they are in their careers.

The survey (now closed to responses) can be viewed here. (N.B. I make no claims about being an HR person or a professional pollster.)

I received thirty-one responses in eleven days. Most of those responses (just over 40%) were from people who identified as being “Late Career”. It would have been nice to have more responses to add statistical strength to comparisons between experience levels. Maybe I should have been more blatant about offering ice cream vouchers as rewards for responses.

This bar graph shows the compiled responses from all experience levels.

As a whole, respondents identified “basic geoscience knowledge” as being most important skill for continued employment in the petroleum industry. Two “soft skill” (interpersonal skills and adaptability) round out the top three. In other words, being a good geoscientist is key.

Note the difference between “basic geoscience” and “software skills”. It’s great to become a whiz with Petrel or some similar software package. But there is a difference between knowing how to push buttons and actually knowing the science behind what you are doing while pushing those buttons. Eventually, people who don’t really understand basic geoscience become known, they get sniffed out despite the multi-coloured graphics. Although 3D visualizations that show how deviated wells cross faults and target horizons can seem impressive, you need to understand and be able to describe what the fault intersections mean in terms of fracture permeability, drilling hazards, or lost proppant.

Interpersonal skills ranked second in importance. It generally isn’t enough to be technically good. You will need to convince co-workers and management that your work is good and your ideas worth acting upon. You will need partners, vendors and others to trust you and your judgement. An ability to make presentations and write reports is a small part of that effort. The subconscious messages you send by your behaviour at meetings, the tone of your voice when conversing with co-workers and management, do you make eye contact, how quickly you respond to requests for help, etc. etc. are all parts of these interpersonal skills. Some people are naturally good at these things, others are not (mea culpa). But they are skills that can be improved through practice. As I suggested in a previous article, it is important to get out and network in person.

Note the difference between “basic geoscience” and “specialist geoscience”. The former was ranked as being about twice as important than the latter. Combined with “adaptability” ranking third, I interpret this to mean that adaptable generalists are more likely to have continued employment than subject-matter experts, especially if the latter are not willing to try other things. For you students out there, keep this in mind during grad school: overspecialization can be a career killer. It can be fun to really focus your research and course work on some specialized aspect of geochemistry, geophysics or geology. Your supervisor will encourage that. It will be a good option if you plan on an Academic career. But if you intend to enter the oil patch, be sure to get a well-rounded geoscience education through course work, summer internships, attending Department seminars, etc.

Breaking down the responses by experience group is interesting. Neither the early- or mid-career respondents ranked “basic geoscience” as the most important skill. For late-career respondents, basic geoscience skills were seen as being the most important for continued employment in the petroleum industry. Do these differences represent changing times, or different perspectives – the late-career people arguably having a clearer picture of what is necessary in the long term? Good question…

Interestingly, and despite much current fanfare, none of the experience groups appeared to rank “machine learning” skills as being important.

My first class is in two days. I’ll attempt some extra massaging of the data before then, but will be showing these hot-off-the-presses results to the students. Thanks to respondents for helping out.

Here is a link to the responses, with some basic graphics, in spreadsheet format. If your Python code, or other skills, finds some interesting correlations or trends in the data, please share.