Live an Adventure: Make Your Career in Oil and Gas

Like travel? Adventure? The chance to make a real difference and overcome challenges? If this sounds like you, consider a career in oil and gas.

Stephanie Mertz Farrar, Phoenix Technology Services: “So my first introduction into oil and gas was in university, I'm from the University of Florida, did mechanical engineering, Schlumberger heavily recruited from my university. When you graduate with a mechanical engineering degree, there are a lot of different areas you could go into. It’s kind of a tough decision and I was probably 24 and Schlumberger offered ‘Hey, do you want to live internationally and we will pay all of your bills,’ and so I jumped right on that bandwagon and I worked in Norway for 3 years after that.”

Theresa Baumgartner, Shell: “You see all these pictures about drilling rigs in the desert and offshore platforms and that is very interesting and intriguing, especially for young people. From my perspective, I can say it is very international, I have worked with multiple research groups and different companies and usually those are only 10% Americans and the rest is internationals, Europeans, Chinese, Indian from all over the world that try to solve probably the hardest problems. That is also very rewarding that it is not just Houstonians or just from Texas.”

Opportunities are many. A recent study forecasts that nearly 1.9 million direct job opportunities in the oil and natural gas and the petrochemical industries will be created through 2035. Of those job opportunities, the study projects that women will fill more than 290 thousand or 16 percent of the total.

In addition, Hispanic workers will account for 576 thousand jobs and African American workers 131 thousand over the 20-year period, accounting for nearly 40% of total job opportunities.

And it’s not boring. This industry offers loads of opportunities to really make a difference.

Stephanie Mertz Farrar: “What surprised me was the amount of change you actually can be a part of, typically if you are in a bigger company or you are in another industry there is a lot of red tape and there are a lot of processes that have already been made. Going into oil and gas, especially from the directional drilling side, there is a lot of change that you can be a part of and a lot of change that you can help influence.”

Theresa Baumgartner: “And certain things haven’t really changed over the last 30 years and so you bring in new technology and you truly make step changes whereas in that industry that has to focus even more on safety let’s say airplanes, the designs are pretty much set, all you can do is change a tiny percentage of a percentage and make optimize those things but you can't really do things completely in a different way, but in the oil and gas industry you have that opportunity and I would say especially in drilling where so much room for improvement and young people and fresh ideas and everybody that is a bit more creative can contribute to and you see that change still within a few years of working which is very rewarding as well.”

Oil and gas is a global industry with nearly boundless and diverse career options. In it, you can find careers where you will travel, work in an office or in the field; in the lab, engineering, sales, management, IT, cybersecurity, and more.

Theresa Baumgartner: “A petroleum engineering background is not necessary really so if you have something else a technical degree, a mechanical engineering, you pick up whatever you need to know in your job fairly easily and you have this broad set of skills you can use for more diverse roles.”

No matter where your interests lie, oil and gas can take you there.