While oil and gas is rebounding, offshore jobs remain hard to find – Houston Chronicle

Photo: Steve Gonzales, Houston Chronicle

Tarek Ghazi, is photographed at the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC 2017) Thursday, May 4, 2017, in Houston. Tarek, who was laid off in November after the offshore job market hasn't recovered as fast as the onshore shale industry, is one of many highly trained professionals still looking for work.

Tarek Ghazi, is photographed at the Offshore Technology Conference...

Erin Donlon came to the Offshore Technology Conference for the first time this week, immersing himself in the world of deepwater drilling a world that, until recently, he was sure he'd want to enter himself.

The pay was great and the work seemed exciting, so when Donlon arrived at Maine Maritime Academy as the oil boom accelerated in 2013, he set his sights on oil rigs. Now, with the industry still shaking off the worst bust in 30 years, he considers himself fortunate that he's not graduating until December, hoping that more opportunities open offshore.

"Once we had the [oil] recession, I thought, 'That's going to be interesting,'" said Donlon, 23, one of a handful students selected to attend OTC this year from his school in Castine, Maine. "A lot of people graduating this month, they're like, 'What can I do?'"

That sense of guarded optimism was common among job seekers at OTC this year, as the oil industry's prospects have brightened somewhat, but not enough to lead to widespread hiring that would recover the more than 200,000 jobs cut in the United States after prices began their plunge at the end of 2014, according to the Labor Department.

Only about 30,000 of those jobs have come back since the market bottomed last year, concentrated onshore in areas where oil and gas are cheaper to extract, particularly West Texas' Permian Basin and increasingly the Eagle Ford shale in South Texas.

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Renewed hiring has largely bypassed the offshore sector. Anthony Caridi, an oil and gas recruiter with the Houston firm QTSI, offered a grim assessment of the situation for those still looking for work.

"Anything drilling is a no-go," he says. "Offshore is even more of a no-go."

Another year of job help

This marked the second year in which OTC tried to support displaced workers with networking events and workshops to help people polish their LinkedIn profiles and interviewing skills. A session Monday filled to capacity, with some people looking to change jobs, recent graduates hoping to score their first positions and many others trying to get back on their feet.

At a roundtable discussion about resume writing, human resources professional Metha Vasquez coached attendees on how to characterize jobs they might have taken outside their fields after a layoff: As "other experience" at the bottom of the page, with "relevant experience" at the top.

"I don't want you to be discouraged by this," Vasquez said. "A lot of people have been unemployed for a long time, and they're working at Walmart. That's not their career, they're paying the bills, that's okay."

Another table focused on setting up consulting businesses. Companies cut mostly early-career employees during the national recession from 2007 to 2009, but the oil bust fell hardest on those with many years of experience who were too young to retire.

Those older workers have the skills to win contracts with companies that might have hiring freezes in place, but still need to get certain projects done, according to Susan Howes, vice president of engineering at Subsurface Consultants and Associates of Houston. Her company puts together teams of technical professionals like geologists and petroleum engineers working as independent contractors to complete short-term projects for oil and gas companies.

She was flooded with resumes during the bust, and most of those workers are still around.

"I wouldn't say that the pool of applicants has contracted," Howes says. "There are still companies that are going through reductions in force, and there are people who are still looking, they've been looking for a while."

That pool includes Tarek Ghazi, a geologist with 40 years of experience, 20 spent at ConocoPhillips before working for several other companies. He was laid off from a small reservoir data firm last November, and has had a few interviews since.

But he remains philosophical about the experience, which he knows is inevitable in the boom-and-bust cycles of oil and gas.

"I would never get discouraged, because that is the nature of the industry," he says. For that reason, he's careful not to get too excited about hints of a recovery. "I don't know if it is a real uptick, or a bunch of self-reinforcing rumors."

Ghazi and others take solace in the company of others who've found themselves in between jobs, with new organizations like the Society of Petroleum Engineers' Members in Transition group and the Houston-centric Pay it Forward Networking Program, which coordinates tours and training sessions with energy companies to help people maintain their skills and make connections. Those support communities help ease the burden of unemployment, by making people realize they're not alone and the layoff wasn't their fault.

Still, they can't create jobs that don't exist. Case in point: In late March, SPE held a career fair with 350 job seekers and 15 employers. A month later, according to organizers, the companies have reported filling only two positions with people who attended the event.

Shifting needs

Drilling companies are mostly waiting on oil prices to rise before shifting back into gear. But for unemployed energy workers, a recovery in production may not get them their jobs back.

That's because companies are re-evaluating which jobs they need, and which can be replaced by automation. Among them: rig maintenance, which can be accomplished by robots piloted by operators onshore.

"A lot of companies are looking at what the alternative might be to just plain rehiring," says Rachel Everaard, who leads the oil and gas human resources team for the consulting firm EY. "Certainly you're not going to replace all drillers with remote operations next year, but you'll start to see them hire fewer and fewer, as they start to do things differently."

For now, the sluggish recovery hasn't dashed the hopes of young workers still hoping to break into the industry. Donlon, the Maine Maritime student, will graduate with a Coast Guard Unlimited license, allowing him to pilot ships, and he'd like to put it to work in oil exploration.

Even if renewable energy and increasing fuel efficiency cuts into demand for some petroleum products, Donlon expects that other products, such as petrochemicals, will keep the oil and gas industry vibrant.

"The oil industry pretty much runs everything and 'I'd like to be part of something where I can have an impact," said Donlon. "It's a waiting game, for now. There's definitely hope."

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While oil and gas is rebounding, offshore jobs remain hard to find - Houston Chronicle