URTeC 2025: Molding engineers and young professionals for the evolving oil and gas landscape
The final day of URTeC on June 11 saw continued discussions on the opportunities and challenges facing the unconventional resources sector. One of these challenges was not a discussion unique to URTeC; from conferences like CERAWeek earlier this year to present, the issue of sourcing new talent and preventing knowledge loss in the industry has been a persistent concern across the oil and gas industry.
As a professor in the Petroleum Engineering Department of the University of Houston, Prof. Mohamed Yusuf Soliman has a front-row seat to some of the ongoing difficulties plaguing the pipeline of new talent. “Every company and area [of the industry] I’ve worked for has been very interested in it,” he said, in reference to the issue of hiring and sourcing new talent. During the panel, he emphasized that part of the issue is the cyclical nature of the broader industry, as well as within the specific unconventional resources sector.
Honesty about industry’s ups and downs. Day-one discussions of the Bakken and Midland shales’ “price-sensitive” barrels clearly backed this point, and SLB’s U.S. Talent Acquisition manager, Lisette Garcia, stressed that honesty is the best policy, even when encouraging young professionals and graduates toward the field. “We need to be honest with students early on,” she noted. “Layoffs are going to be there in the downturns.” The uncertainty is greater for industry-specific studies—petroleum engineering, for example, versus electrical or mechanical engineering—but the panelists still saw opportunities for continued research.
Workforce trends. “The important thing that’s changing everything right now is A.I.,” Soliman noted, echoing the general industry discussion about the technology. The ongoing attention on A.I. has resulted in greater academic research, with similar upticks in research in the renewables space. Those trends, in the view of Jennifer Miskimins—Professor and Head of the Petroleum Engineering Department at Colorado School of Mines—reflect a shift in the incoming workforce. “Incoming students at this point in time don’t necessarily care about hundred-dollar oil or the big paycheck; they care about making a difference,” said Miskimins.
Changing perceptions. This emphasis on values, according to the panelists, touches on one of the industry’s long-enduring challenges: perception. Yet, according to Miskimins, this presents an opportunity to attract more graduates to the industry. “Twenty percent of people know what we do [in the oil and gas industry]; 20% of them will never change their (negative) opinion. The other 60% is what you want to focus your time on.” Soliman also pointed out that “people have underestimated how much energy is in one barrel of oil,” and that now, “the question is going to be how to use it efficiently.” That question of efficiency, part of the broader conversation on the future of the energy industry, is what the panel suggested as the key to attracting the next generation of professionals.
