Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Oil and Gas Companies Are Now Poaching Employees From Each Other

Oil rigs and tankers off the coast of Galveston
Credit https://flic.kr/p/xzPDU
Oil rigs and tankers off the coast of Galveston

The global boom in energy production driven by fracking and horizontal drilling is leading to a shortage of skilled workers. A new report by the human resources firm Mercer says two-thirds of oil and gas companies are now poaching employees from their competitors.

"The industry seems inclined when an individual is trained and developed by a competitor to, especially in the first five years of employment, go after that key talent, as opposed to training and developing their own,"  says Philip Tenenbaum, a senior partner at Mercer. 

He says in some cases, the practice has become quite overt.  

"An employer simply sends an email to key employees at a competitor with a job offer at a 50 percent salary increase, without a need for an interview," Tenenbaum says. "Not necessarily in the U.S. at this point, but I can see it coming [here]."

Jobs in the U.S. energy sector will nearly double to 3 million by the end of the decade, according to a separate reportthis week from the human resources company Manpower.

That report says the labor shortage is being driven by three major factors: an aging workforce; rapid advances in technology that are changing skill requirements; and a lack of education in science, technology, engineering and math. 

“If somebody came to me on the Gulf Coast, some high-school kid, and said, ‘I don’t know what to do with my life,’ I’d tell him, ‘Learn to weld,'" Jim Ivany with Bechtel Corp., the biggest U.S. construction contractor, told Bloomberg News.

Copyright 2014 KUT 90.5

Nathan Bernier a KUT reporter and the local host during All Things Considered and Marketplace. He grew up in the small mountain town of Nelson, BC, Canada, and worked at commercial news radio stations in Ottawa, Montreal and Boston before starting at KUT in 2008.