If you enjoy frigid and probably dangerous conditions there’s good news for you: a position in the North Sea may be waiting for you.
Apparently the oil and gas sector in the UK is hurting for workers, and with an inability to find permanent employees with the right mix of skills and experience the sector has been turning to freelancers and umbrella company contractors in droves.
It’s not just the writing on the wall that I’m talking about here, either – Oil & Gas UK just came out with its yearly Economic Report, and it says more or less the same things I just did, just a bit more eloquently. Essentially there are serious problems up in the North Sea fields, and there’s evidence that even if the entire freelancing community got behind the sector it might still not be enough to turn things around.
On the one hand, there’s only so many contract workers to go around with the right skills for these particularly specific jobs. Eventually this could exhaust the supply of workers, leaving the industry right in the same rut that it’s currently in.
On top of that, competition from other drill sites around the world is also luring British workers away in droves. Domestic immigration policies also place limitations on importing skilled workers from abroad, which means that while it’s easy pickings for a freelancer right now the industry could end up collapsing under its own weight.
As if things weren’t bad enough, it’s getting harder to provide efficient drilling efforts as of late. Yields are down as well, and this could mean that these North Sea fields could end up winding themselves down sooner rather than later as oil and gas companies go looking for better locations.
Now maybe it’s just me and my cheery, sunny disposition but if we’re draining the North Sea fields dry isn’t it time to start transitioning to alternative energy generation? Wind, solar and wave energy are all fantastic investment opportunities, and creating offshore wind farms could create plenty of job opportunities as well. We can’t just go about sucking the Earth dry because we’re addicted to fossil fuels, you know.
Then again, I’m not in charge. If I was things would be done a little bit differently around here, let me tell you that!
