Top Soft Skills the Oil, Gas Industry Needs

Top Soft Skills the Oil, Gas Industry Needs
While the industry works its way toward a recovery, Rigzone highlights specific soft skills that will be needed by oil and gas workers.

It’s a crucial time for the oil and gas industry. After more than two years of layoffs and other cost-cutting measures, the industry has begun to show early signs of a recovery. With OPEC finally agreeing to cut crude oil production at the beginning of 2017, it could mean a balancing of the market and increase in oil prices.

And this potentially opens the door for employment opportunities in months ahead. Good news for the 350,000 plus workers across the world who have been laid off due to the oil glut. Most are ready to get back to work – as well as a fresh crop of engineering graduates, soon-to-be graduates and young kids studying STEM disciplines.  

In the meantime, aspiring oil and gas professionals and educators alike should keep abreast of the specific skills and training that will be necessary for the future workforce.

Check out this video to learn what soft skills the oil and gas industry will need most!



WHAT DO YOU THINK?


Generated by readers, the comments included herein do not reflect the views and opinions of Rigzone. All comments are subject to editorial review. Off-topic, inappropriate or insulting comments will be removed.

Simon Philips  |  December 12, 2016
Excellent points by Valerie, and these findings match research done Warren Business Consulting this year into the Skills Gap. As one O&G banker observed in the study, soft skills are often much harder to develop than so-called hard skills, as they involve the uncertainties and ambiguities of human behavior - exacerbated as Valerie points out, by cultural differences in a global industry. Developing soft skills should be part of everyones active career management. I would also add a sense of innovation to the list of sot skills - a willingness to challenge the conventional way of doing things.
Yanet Garcia Bustamante  |  December 07, 2016
Great advice and information. As you pointed out, I am as well very willing to have abroad work experience. Social networking and media have helped a lot has helped a lot to integrate more professionals with the field news and industry which quite diverse and interesting.
Lesli Wood  |  December 07, 2016
We all know these soft skills are critical. We all talk about teamplayers, team work, integrated teams, etc. but how many schools actually work with students to expose them to the soft skills needed to work in an cross-disciplinary team of earthscientists, engineers, geophysicists, economists, etc.. My predecessor, Bob Weimer co-taught a course here at Colorado School of Mines called Integrated Exploration and Development, which I gladly took his roll in when I took his Chair that creates true cross-disciplinary teams of students in complex, integrated evaluation projects. They are getting it. More schools need to do this and I dont mean asking a bunch of geology students to do an integrated basin analysis, but involving the disciplines that you will need to involve in industry.


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