Energy companies say there is much oil and gas still to be exploited in the North Sea, but onshore the engineers required to do the job may be getting thinner on the ground.
A survey by Opito, the skills body that represents the North Sea industry, found that 81% of companies it surveyed are expecting to grow over the next five years. And nearly half of those firms expect to expand their workforce this year.
Amanda Chilcott, human resources director at BP North Sea, says the future looks bright: “Coming to work here blew away my preconceptions about the North Sea as a dead or dying basin. When you actually come up here and find out what’s going on, there’s a phenomenal amount of activity.”
BP, for example, runs 45 producing fields and 13 manned platforms, which it says makes it the largest operator in the North Sea. It is locating new reserves as well as making the most of fields that have already been identified and drilled.
BP employs geophysicists, geologists, scientists, technicians and offshore workers as well as project managers and finance wizards. But the biggest recruitment problem is, perhaps unsurprisingly, finding engineers for specialist roles.
Chilcott says: “We get a good range of applications for most roles that we post in the marketplace. We’re lucky in that we can play on our brand and the projects we’ve got going as the biggest operator in the North Sea, which generate a lot of interest.
“But when we look at specialist roles we are fighting harder because the pool is smaller. The fundamental aim of everything we do is to try to figure out how to expand that talent pool. It gets more and more competitive in the end, which is a difficult situation for everybody.”
Opito confirms that engineering and managerial roles are the most difficult to fill. Gillian Black of the organisation says: “Companies are telling us that demand for appropriately skilled staff continues to outstrip supply, and that they are prepared to pay a premium for experience.
“We need to widen the talent pool, and not take from within, to increase the number of people coming into the industry. And attracting more female workers in is a key issue.”
Opito predicts that some additional 10,000 employees will be required over the next five years. The heavier tax burden imposed on oil companies by the government in the budget, which has angered Oil & Gas UK, the industry body, has generated gloomy headlines about prospects in the North Sea which are not going to help alleviate skills shortages, Black says.
“We were initially predicting a further 15,000 workers would be required but we had to reduce that in light of reinvestment figures coming out of Oil & Gas UK. We understood why it had to revise them following the tax increase, because it needed to get the message across to government. But those headlines don’t necessarily help attract people into the industry, because they can create the impression that there aren’t jobs here.”
BP, for one, has been recruiting heavily this year. So far it has brought in more than 140 staff across its operations in the UK and Norway, with 70 job offers in the pipeline, says Chilcott. Also, the company’s graduate trainee scheme will welcome 55 new recruits this month (see box). Yet BP still has 100 vacancies to fill. Part of the problem is that the UK operation supplies staff for other sites round the world, such as Angola and the Gulf of Mexico. “We are a net exporter of talent,” says Chilcott.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster off the US coast last year has not had an adverse effect on applications, she says, though the situation might have been different had BP been recruiting at the time. “We weren’t in the market in a big way last summer, so it’s difficult to say what would have been the case had we been recruiting in the immediate aftermath. But we’ve been in the market strongly from the back end of last year and nationally, even globally, we initially saw an uptick in the number of people who were interested in BP or putting in an application.”
The group’s North Sea recruitment problems will be familiar to anyone who has been observing the engineering industry in recent years. Despite the message about the
importance of engineers having seemingly penetrated the highest circles of government, Chilcott believes the industry still suffers from perceptual problems.
“There is still a tendency among the student population to perceive the engineering industries, whether oil and gas or automotive and manufacturing, as not current, not sexy or exciting. That’s a perception we’re trying to address, the perception that the UK is no longer a manufacturing or engineering country.
“In our view, oil and gas is an incredibly exciting industry to be a part of.”
'Offshore work is so exciting'
One of BP’s rising stars in the North Sea is Rebecca Brannigan, who studied mechanical engineering at University College Dublin before taking a summer job at BP in Aberdeen, and then joined the group’s graduate scheme.
“I chose engineering to study because it kept most doors open for me,” she says. “I love maths. At school in Ireland I was studying accounting, German, physics and chemistry, and engineering provided a way for me to keep up with my favourite subjects.”
After completing a general engineering course at UCD she specialised in mechanical. “I realised that I’m quite a visual person – I need to be able to see things to understand them properly and mechanical engineering was the closest to that.”
Brannigan became interested in BP after attending a university talk given by a student who had worked in the North Sea during the summer. “I didn’t know much about BP at first but did some research and was able to secure a summer job. I enjoyed that so much I came back after my degree. Offshore work is so exciting.”
She visits schools in Aberdeen and the surrounding area to promote engineering as a subject. She has also set up a science project for schools with the help of the IMechE. “I didn’t grow up wanting to be an engineer – my parents are both teachers. But I’ve always liked problem-solving, puzzles and knowing how things work. My degree hasn’t been in vain – I actually get to use it, and I now have chartered status.”
