In this article we will try to answer the question of whether working in oil and gas industry is an attractive option or not.
By Konstantin Borisov
This writer became interested in the topic in the course of numerous discussions with Western managers working in Russia.
The expat professionals have been pointing out that in Western countries, first of all in the US and UK, the prestige accorded to oil and gas industry as a field of employment has considerably shrunk over the last decade. There are several reasons for this. First and foremost, it concerns a vivid development of other industries offering competitive salaries and career growth opportunities, such as telecommunications and high-tech, finance, marketing and PR.
Whereas in the 1970s the brightest graduates were looking for employment at oil companies in the hope of big salaries, prestigious jobs and quick promotions, now they choose other niches, for the same reasons. The other most important reason has been the perceptions of oil and gas industry as a "non-ecological," and often "unethical," field of employment. There is no denying that the image of oil industry has been soiled by continuous conflicts with ecologists, and ecology is something people pay much attention to in the civilized world today. Corruption scandals, with even the biggest oil companies sometimes involved, add fuel to the fire as well. As a result, in the West there are much fewer students and graduates now opting for jobs in oil and gas companies. Working in banking or telecommunications, they have the same prospects as they would in oil and gas, minus the necessity to travel to countries prone to political instability, such as Nigeria or Iraq.
The outcome is that, indeed, outside Russia the staff at oil and gas companies "grow old," with no cadre of professionals sufficiently numerous to step in their shoes. But does this problem exist in Russia? In search of an answer we looked into the statistics compiled by ANCOR, as well as our observations concerning Russian job seekers in and outside Moscow. It turned out that in Moscow and St. Petersburg this tendency does exist - because "non-oil" industries in these cities are well developed, the oil and gas indeed has to compete for the best and the brightest with other industries, first of all finance, as well as "heavy" industries - metallurgy and the power industry. Many job seekers getting a job offer from an oil or services company do not jump at it but take their time looking for something better - and often they find this something. The biggest amount of job offer rejections relates to the service sector companies, where salaries are a bit lower and the work is more troublesome. So, in Moscow and St. Petersburg the job recruitment for oil and gas industry is becoming ever more difficult.
Increasingly fewer Moscow and St. Petersburg residents are enrolling at oil industry-related university departments, while the lawyers and finance and logistics professionals prefer working in industries other than oil and gas.
In other cities the situation is quite different. Because in many regions, especially in the Trans-Ural area, as well as in Tatarstan, Bashkiria, and in the south of Russia, oil and gas industry has been traditionally strong, while such sectors as services or finance have been, to say the least, underdeveloped, oil industry is viewed as the most prestigious, and often the only worthwhile employment opportunity. In Russian regions, ecological problems are not something one pays attention to - this is the way things have been for years. So, to a question like "what industry do you prefer?", the job seekers with "non-oil" degrees, such as finance, logistics, administration, inevitably answer "oil." Besides competitive salaries, employment at an oil and gas company is often the only chance a resident of the city of Ishimbay (Bashkortostan) or Okha (Sakhalin) may have for "rising above the crowd" and relocating to Moscow or St.Petersburg - a traditional beacon for provincial job seekers.
So, our clients - oil and services companies - have become more inclined to fish among the provincial job seekers even when recruiting for their head offices in Moscow: for the applicants from the regions, oil industry remains a prestigious field of employment.
Comments by HR Manager:
Yekaterina Ruchkina, Geotransgaz
"Based on my experience, at present, financiers, accountants, lawyers, HR managers, administration personnel, and purchasing agents are eager to work for oil and gas companies. 'Extraweights' of the fuel and energy complex have created an image of the attractive employer offering high level compensations and bearing social responsibility to an employee, the employer who is ready to develop and take care of qualified specialists.
I think that oil and gas companies look attractive also because the RF investment market in minds of Russia's people is substantially associated with the oil industry and strongly depends upon it.
An opinion prevailing among applicants is that oil and gas are open to labor market only to some extent and it is necessary to have some patronage and personal relations in order to get a job there.
Perhaps this myth makes employment in the oil industry even more attractive."
