What are the best positions here that non O&G companies recruit from without much of a pay cut?
12 replies (most recent on top)
@OP Most engineering disciplines.
As far as pay cuts are concerned, you will almost certainly end up taking one when you leave O&G, and you’ll receive low-ball offers from non-O&G recruiters. No industry other than O&G pays their employees (and executives) so much to do so little, so no matter where you end up, you’ll feel like you’re working harder for less money.
Most geoscientist will only match their current salary by going to another O&G company. Other options exist like state and federal government, environmental, some renewable energy firms and academia but will most likely take a pay cut. On the plus side these jobs are located in places other than Houston and are more stable than O&G.
The CEO position. See what Rex did!
You can find many of the job functions/titles at other companies that you find at Exxon - but when you compare HOW they do their work, it's totally different. The molasses of Exxon processes gums up how things should be done. So the real question is not as one-dimensional as: title/job function/department. It's much more than that - are you a go getter, fast learner, flexible, able to work without tons of guidance or process (this is a big one), and many more. Case and point: take a planner from Exxon planning department and send them to another big company, upstream, downstream or chemical. Think they'd be a superstar there? Ha Ha no! Their power point, backup notebooks and endless spreadsheets are useless. Judgement my friend.
I hear the pilots for the corporate jets can get awesome jobs/hours/pay especially given Exxon's aviation safety record
in general . . . the pay cut is the challenge. Some geoscience, Chemical Engineering, Materials Engineering, would pay the best. Chemistry maybe. Mathematicians some. my 2cents
Procurement/ supply chain, anything in EMIT, any kind of accounting, planning or analyst role.
@1fox+1c6D0lwn Process Technicians are highly transferrable to other industries, but they usually don’t pay as well as O&G
How about pilot plant technician? Not looking promising up here.
Any role that has "digitalization" as a key component. Technology providers and digitalization software providers are actively recruiting engineers with experience at combining plant data with digital twins and creating the KPI's from the plant data.
Even the CEO of Lummus stated at a recent conference that he felt that university engineering graduates with a minor in software digitalization were in high demand.
Just look at people on LINKDEDIN that are now employed by SEEQ that used to work for ExxonMobil last year. They all highlight their "digitalization" background at ExxonMobil on LINKEDIN.
Engineering. Not Science.
Global Projects plus any of the corporate functions (Law, HR, EMIT, etc)