The New E&P Workforce: How Employers Benefit from Building the Pool of Independent Employees

Principles that underlie the upcoming hands-on workshop on “personal” adaptive skills created by CAREER PARTNERING and sponsored by the Houston Geological Society to be presented in May. See page 25.
New Career Patterns
Restructuring of the oil and gas industry over the last two decades has led to a restructuring of the E&P workforce. The flattening and downsizing of organizations has ended the concept of career paths and replaced it with the new concept of career patterns. Personal career planning today and corporate workforce development need to be based on these new patterns of employment. People in the oil and gas industry are Independent Employees, Dependent Employees, self-employed Free Agents, or unemployed and underemployed Outlanders. Over the past two decades many Dependent Employees have been laid off so that the ranks of Free Agents and Outlanders have greatly increased in the overall workforce. In order to staff their projects corporations need to tap all four-career patterns to compete successfully (Figure 1).
Although most new hires from colleges and universities start their careers as Dependent Employees, many desire to move swiftly toward independence. Virtually all major oil and gas companies, and some large service companies, have instituted new programs to smooth the transition from school to work in order to recruit and retain employees, and to maximize their value by shortening the “apprentice,” or so-called “onboarding” period. Some of these programs also will be successful in “bonding” employees to the company, and some may not, but all will have the result of creating a workforce pool of technically proficient, more independent employees. Scenarios of the future suggest the likelihood that most E&P professionals in the United States will be Independent Employees or Free Agents. Dependent employment may only continue to thrive in government agencies, universities, and in overseas national oil and gas companies.
The message for both individuals and organizations is clear. Technical skill is necessary, but not sufficient, for long-term success in the oil and gas industry. Both individuals and organizations need the speed and innovation that results from high levels of independence, connectedness, and foresight. There are many Outlanders who have good, even superior and unique, technical skills, but they remain underemployed or unemployed. They have not yet developed the adaptive skills that can allow them to reconnect to the mainstream of the industry. Most of these people failed to anticipate the magnitude of change that swept over them. Although some are quite creative, they lack the skills to transform innovation to the marketplace, and most fail to realize and appreciate how they are personally positioned in their profession; e.g., how they are perceived in the minds of their potential clients, employers, and peers.
Attributes of Independence
Independent Employees and Free Agents are characterized by having both the excellent technical and adaptive skills necessary to exercise choice. Independent Employees can choose to bond and remain with a single employer, or they can move from one company to another as the uncertain industry landscape shifts around them. Free Agents have the freedom to choose their clients, their work style, their location, and the amount of time they will invest in their profession. Independent professionals can choose the career pattern or sequence of career patterns in which they will work, and every professional who masters the skills of anticipation has the chance to choose which alternative future they will pursue.
All professionals working in the industry have a high level of technical competence, regardless of the “pattern” of their employment. The skills that distinguish Independent Employees and Free Agents from Dependent Employees and Outlanders are most often their non-technical, Adaptive Skills. To remain competitive, now and in the future, everyone will need to acquire and practice these skills to an advanced level of competency.
Case History
A major oil company laid off a petroleum engineer. Although he had always done a good job as a professional, he was totally unprepared for life outside the corporation. In an effort to sustain income, he “hung out his shingle” as a consultant. In his years with the corporation he had not developed his own image and reputation, nor had he built a large network of external contacts. As a result he had trouble getting work, and when he did get work it was not of his own choosing. Assignments offered him were trouble-shooting engineering problems in some of the most difficult and unpleasant locations in the world. It took him five years to develop his own image and reputation for quality work that allowed him to begin to influence the choice of his work. He began to achieve the kind of success he wanted by building his name recognition associated with quality work, by building an effective, personal “structure of connectedness,” and by defining his niche and anticipating the need for his specific engineering expertise. Today he has a steady clientele of domestic companies who rely on him to monitor processes and solve problems in specific engineering functions consistent with his expertise.
Career-Building, Adaptive Skills
All petroleum professionals share a few critical needs: 1) to maintain a high level of technical excellence, 2) to take responsibility for their own careers, and 3) to build their own personal and professional influence throughout their careers. As professionals mature, more is expected of them. Whether it is called experience, insight, or the ability to get things done, everyone needs to develop a set of strategies that shows how he or she adds value to every project, and every employer or client, at every stage of their career. And the time span over which this process takes place is being compressed-the process is accelerating. The critical adaptive skills that make this possible are the skills of becoming independent and connected, and anticipating the future. The most fundamental of these skills is connectedness (Figure 2).
Connectedness.
Well-connected individuals have literally many thousands of people in their personal network of contacts, and can get the answers to difficult questions or access to critical information with far less than “six degrees of separation.” Most people in the petroleum industry have relatively small networks and have spent little time and effort in the development of their personal “structure of connectedness.” In the last century, corporate employees were discouraged from having large networks outside their own company lest security be breached. In this century, dominated by alliances, information flow, and shared, knowledge-based technology, being connected both inside and outside a company is essential. In this environment, it is advantageous, for both individuals and organizations, to encourage the construction of large, interconnected webs of contacts across all kinds of organizational, discipline, generational, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. And more importantly, individuals will need to develop and practice the skills of maintaining, expanding, and USING their network to extend their abilities and influence. After all, the goal is to access information rapidly and effectively for one’s employer. The path to mastery of these skills, however, is neither easy nor obvious. Many people seem to believe that a network is used only during a job search. Au contraire! It should not be surprising to see connectedness become a measure of performance and personal value in the corporate structure at some point in the near future. Professionals who can bri