The Talent Crisis: Bridging the Generational Gap

M. Miller¹, H. Miller¹, and B. Shoup¹

Abstract

As a result of the oil and gas industry lay-offs of the 1990’s, there is a considerable generational gap between the now retiring “baby boomers” and the incoming ‘millennial” generation. This experience hiatus is creating an impending talent crisis that will potentially have a strong negative impact on the industry and the upstream sector in particular. Each and every dry hole teaches a lesson. Those lessons in turn help avoid future dry holes. However, as experienced petroleum geoscientists are retiring and leaving the industry, the lessons from those past dry holes are leaving with them. This exodus of corporate knowledge will result in the drilling of more dry holes than necessary as new geoscientists re-learn old lessons.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90188 ©GEO-2014, 11th Middle East Geosciences Conference and Exhibition, 10-12 March 2014, Manama, Bahrain