Diversification

Or how to create opportunities in the oil and gas industry

THE last few years have been turbulent for the oil and gas industry. As oil prices dropped, production companies stopped expanding. The service industry began to struggle to maintain workload, and had to downsize as the number of new projects dried up.

The era of traditional roles and niche expertise in the service industry is slowly coming to an end, and employers and employees need to constantly adapt to volatile market demands.

As a process engineer in a service-based industry for 13 years I have seen how the changes in the market have been defining my career over the last few years. I came from a design process engineering background, and found myself gravitating towards safety engineering roles: performing fire studies which are typically performed by specialists, writing emergency escape routes, and assisting in noise studies and vibration monitoring

Transferring skills

I constantly need to redefine my scope of work as dictated by project requirements. Even though I’m performing diverse new functions, I am still using my skills, experience and knowledge gained as a process engineer. For example, while carrying out a fire study, I was able to reduce the fire zone that was defined, based on a conservative starting pressure.