Offshore Oil Jobs – Do You Have What It Takes?

Offshore oil jobs are going to be hot for the coming decade. Why? With oil prices passing $100 and expected to hit $200 due to a variety of uncertainties in the supply, companies are eagerly coughing up the multi-million and billion dollars needed to build the oil rigs and pipelines needed to get more oil. Those oil rigs are not going to run themselves. They need to hire people to run those oil rigs. Which means plenty of jobs all around… If you have what it takes.

There is a reason why offshore oil jobs pay so well. The terms danger pay and hardship pay comes to mind. It doesn’t mean you need to have the stamina to run a marathon, because oil rigs do have admin staff, but the isolation can easily get to you. You’ll be out in the middle of the ocean for anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 weeks, seeing the same faces over and over, day and night. There is no escape to the mall, there is no escape to the bar for a drink, there is no such thing as getting away for the evening. If you’ve ever worked in cubicle land, imagine doing this for 14 to 42 days straight, without a weekend.

It can get creepy out there in the middle of nowhere. Who knows when you may need to stand watch with no one else nearby? Have you ever seen those horror movies? There are two times when you tend to feel most scared and alone – when you are in the middle of a storm, and when the sea is dead calm without even a breeze in the air or a ripple in the ocean. It is easy to say you don’t scare easy now, but wait until you are standing watch alone on the rig, and the night is so quiet you could hear a pin drop and the sea is dead calm.

So you think that you’ll be hired to work on a spanking new oil rig and nothing can go wrong? You obviously have never done any work for a dot com. In boom times, everyone cuts corners. Murphy’s Law is your constant shadow. Your brand new oil rig is probably using some new technologies. There’s no telling what will go wrong. As opposed to an older oil rig, where the things that will go wrong are mostly known. What am I getting at? Old rig or new rig, things can go wrong. And some of those problems can be pretty hair-raising.

You ain’t no wimp. You can handle anything? Maybe. Let’s try this: have you ever flown on an airliner caught in a storm, and heard the wings creaking away? Or caught in the toilet in a high-rise apartment in the middle of an earthquake? Being stuck in the middle of a storm on an oil rig can be much worse.

Basically, to survive offshore oil jobs, you need plenty of guts and you need to be mentally tough. You also need to be strongly motivated, otherwise it is too easy to hide under your blanket in the morning and say you don’t want to get up. To do well, you also need to learn fast, and work hard. These are the qualities you will need to work and prosper in the offshore oil industry.

Jan 28, 2015Calvin_Loh

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