2 years, 7 months ago | Jared Hammond

Oil and Gas Jobs

Higher Oil Price != More Geology Jobs

For this weeks blog post we're going to take a quick look at our geologist colleagues that this industry depends on to keep finding and developing more oil... to keep the rest of our jobs alive

By the way ... Is the term 'rock lickers' derogatory?

Geology Oil & Gas Jobs Added Since Site Launch:

From mid-September to November a steady decrease in jobs which makes sense as everyone winds down for the year.

Suddenly in December a large jump before again flatlining around Christmas and New Year.

From New Years a steady increase in oil and gas geologist jobs ... but it's not a lot of data

There's not a lot to take from the number of jobs graph but here's what I see:

Then looking at the oil price chart (click tab on graph) there is not an obvious correlation between oil price and geo jobs. Actually the correlation is -0.01 comparing weekly price and weekly oil jobs. Offsetting geo jobs by 4 weeks after the oil price it improves to 0.1 which is a very weak positive correlation.

How Many Geologist Jobs Is Normal?

If we were asking this question in ten years time I'd have a database full of data and could definitively tell you but the site is 7 months old. So let's make some guesses:

A rule of thumb I heard from HR ... in the good times... was that each year ~3% of staff leave for a new company. According to Linkedin there are ~50,000 Geologists in the Oil & Energy industry. Performing some elite calculations in Python, that's equivalent to roughly 1500 geologist jobs annually or about 28 geo jobs a week on average. We're currently at 18 geo jobs per week or at roughly 60 % of 'normal' geo jobs.

Where Are All the Oil Geologist Jobs?

Hot Take: They're in the USA

Remarkably half of worldwide geology jobs since August '17 have been in the United States, with the remainder made up by some well known oil countries. According to Linkedin there are roughly 13,000 Geologists in the Oil & Energy industryin the US.

Given that there are ~50,000 geos worldwide the US market contains 25% of the worldwide geologist population yet has 50% of the geologist jobs.

Changing the graph to geo jobs by cities it is a much more even spread although it is obviously going to be dominated by US cities. Some small consolation for Canadian geologists is that Calgary is the #2 city for geology jobs. This suprised me given some news stories I've read of the downturn in Canada. What did suprise me was that Perth did not make the list as it has a large geoscience community but right now isn't a great place to be out of work

Conclusion

After producing these graphs, it seems that:

Oil geologist jobs are steady

About 60% of a healthy job market

Not responding to oil price movements

Jobs are disproportionately in the USA (double the rate of the rest of the world).

Founder | Coder | Reservoir Engineer

Does the last point have have anything to do with the shale plays in the USA being advanced much more than the rest of the world?If you have any thoughts on the geo jobs market leave a comment below or head to the contact page - Jared Hammond

p.s. Help the site out and give it a linkedin share or follow (helps me keep this site free)

Geologist oil jobs posted past 7 days:

I don't want to end of a depressing note so here are the latest geologist jobs over past 7 days