Here's the talent problem. On one hand, petroleum companies would like to hire more well-educated people with an even broader mix of skills. On the other, those people aren’t clamoring to get in the door.

In other words, a business that focuses on filling pipelines may need to pay more attention to a different pipeline.

"People are just not necessarily interested in going into the dirt sciences,” said Jennifer Miskimins, head of the Department of Petroleum Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. “That’s also true for geology, geophysics, mining engineers. You hear about critical minerals mining programs struggling even more than the petroleum-oriented ones.”

Miskimins spoke during a panel discussion at the Unconventional Resources Technology Conference (URTeC) in Houston, along with others from both industry and academia. She showed that the number of petroleum engineers has correlated for decades with the price of oil, except not so much in the last run-up.

“We’re screaming up and down this roller-coaster and the problem now is it’s going down and we’re not really seeing it come back up,” she said. “There is a lot of concern about how are we going to populate the needs of industry in the next several years, decades for people coming into the programs.”

Other factors are widening the mismatch between what industry wants and what colleges can offer, Miskimins said. Colleges are also under pressure from students, parents and governments to increase their four-year graduation rates. The industry wants data analytics, machine learning and AI skills for applications including midstream, carbon capture, geothermal and sustainability.

“The number of requests I’ve had in the past six months on ‘what are your AI programs’ is just absolutely skyrocketing,” she said.

Lisette Garcia, U.S. talent acquisition manager at energy services giant SLB, said the industry is widening its search for talent. She said many new graduates want to work in energy and not necessarily in oil and gas.

“They decide to accept a job in the oil and gas side but expect to transition really quickly in the first two years into the energy sector, which is pretty much impossible to do,” she said. “This leads to a lot of retention issues in oil and gas.”

She also said SLB strives for diversity in hiring.

“We all know that diverse teams have better decisions 87% of the time,” she said. “And diverse leadership teams are 1.7 times more likely to get and capture new markets.”

She said SLB talks to universities about teaching a lifelong growth mindset because many new hires fall short in soft skills like communicating and building relationships.

“We see a lot of struggles,” she said. “We believe sometimes the classroom doesn’t adequately prepare the students to face the complexity of the workforce, the interactions with clients, the problem-solving and critical thinking in the middle of a high-pressure environment.”

It’s not that easy on the academic side, either, said Mohamed Soliman, professor and chair of the engineering department at the University of Houston. UH has added classes in renewable energy, carbon capture and data analytics to meet demand.

“Changing curriculum in universities is not that quick or that easy,” he said. “You need to build the curriculum; you need to get approval from various levels inside the university and also outside. We have to worry about accreditation,” which moves in six-year cycles.

Miskimins said the industry needs to be honest with graduates about the cyclical nature of its careers, as well as the rising demand for new technical skills and soft skills.

“It’s being more than just that engineer that’s going to go in and sit at the desk and be an engineer,” she said.

She said the industry’s traditional high salaries have inflated expectations among some graduates.

In 2015 and 2016, “we had a lot of people that were very upset because they went into a department or into a school system thinking they were going to walk out with that signing bonus and the new truck and everything else,” she said. “It was kind of a rude awakening.”

For now, the approach is to mix in new classes and lean on industry advisory boards to try to keep up with the change. The boards are invaluable, Miskimins said.

These boards “not only help you with curriculum and whatnot, but they really help you gain leverage with the administration,” Miskimins said. “If we need a new faculty position in a certain area or certain skills, they can help point out how important that is.”

Despite the challenges, the industry offers the chance to improve people’s lives around the world while working on billion-dollar projects, Miskimins said. It’s still an effective selling point.

“Look at the really cool things we do,” she said. “Not only that, your petroleum engineering skills can help in geothermal, they can help in hydrogen, they can help in CCS. You talk to them about some of those more exciting things and not just the fact that you might get laid off. You might have a paycheck, you might not have a paycheck, but you can make a difference in the life of people.”

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