In the oil and gas industry they call it “the big crew change” - the race to recruit the skilled engineers and others needed to fuel the current boom in exploration and to squeeze the last profitable drops from existing oilfields.

“People are worried about where their energy comes from, whether the supply is secure and whether it’s environmentally acceptable,” says Mick Cook, managing director of operations for RPS Energy, which provides consulting and outsourcing services to the industry. “Oil and gas may not be seen as clean fuel but it is a staple fuel and as countries look at security of supply, exploration activity is at an unprecedentedly high level.

“The easy oil and gas has all been found, so the exploration now is in ever more difficult places like off the Falkland Islands or, with the melting of the ice sheets, off Greenland and in the Arctic. These are expensive and environmentally sensitive places. We have to ask ourselves is it safe to do the work there, not just environmentally, but also politically? We need people on the ground there and we need to do a lot of research to minimise the risks.”

The technology for finding oil and gas has “come a long way in the past 10 years or so, with 3D seismic surveys, directional drilling and the ability to visualise the sub-surface much more accurately,” says Cook. However, this technology requires skilled operators and the industry faces a severe shortage.

This stems from the late 1980s and 1990s when the industry giants went through a series of mergers and consolidations, cutting the jobs of hundreds of geologists, geophysicists and other engineers and scientists, says Crispian McCredie, managing director and publisher of Petroleum Economist.

“The average age of an engineer is now in the late 40s. Since those who spend a lot of time overseas tend to retire in their early 50s, there is a tremendous drive to recruit young engineers and a lot of wage inflation as a result.”

In this “big crew change”, those joining the industry are likely to find themselves working in Kazakhstan, Nigeria or Angola rather than in the North Sea and Alaska.

The quest for qualified recruits has opened up lucrative opportunities for engineering graduates. One offshore exploration company is offering mechanical engineers with less than a year's experience £25,000-£27,000 a year. A junior field engineering job offers £26,000-£35,000, while a geotechnical engineering post in Glasgow, that requires a few years’ experience, is currently advertised at £40,000. These are basic salaries and work offshore or in oilfields generally attracts extra allowances.

Annika Joelsson, recruitment communications manager for Schlumberger, the leading oil services company, says: “Over the past few years we have been recruiting graduates worldwide at a rate of about 5,000 a year. We think that’s going to be a sustained figure.

“We recruit according to our business forecast, which means that sometimes we need more people in countries that are emerging as important to oil and gas exploration but where higher education does not have the necessary resources. In those countries we are working with universities to bring the courses up to standard. Every day around the world we have 1,200 people in technical training. It’s like running a small university of our own,” says Joelsson.

Much new exploration is in deep water and the industry is currently constrained by a shortage of rigs and equipment. In the next three to four years, 180 new rigs will be coming out of shipyards worldwide, increasing the existing worldwide fleet of 600 by almost a third.

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