Employment in the oil and gas industry crashed a few years ago during the most recent downturn, but current employment numbers have returned to pre-downturn levels, according to a recent report by Deloitte.
The report, titled “Decoding the O&G Downturn,” said the industry’s current employment numbers are at 4.5 million – just one percent below 2013 numbers (before the downturn).
This was due to the 300,000 industry layoffs in oilfield services, pure-play E&Ps and private IOCs being offset by hiring of 255,000 employees by NOCs and pure-play midstream and downstream companies, according to Deloitte.
Essentially, there has been an acceleration of redistribution of oil and gas jobs between segments/regions – specifically analytics-based jobs – and the volume growth and innovation in the industry has supported employment by creating new work profiles.
The report also finds that the hardest hit oilfield services segment managed to maintain research and development (R&D) spending of $3.4 billion (USD). The downstream sector had its highest R&D spend in 2017.
On the flip side, most large IOCs and NOCs reduced the amount they spend on R&D despite technology’s role in lowering breakevens during the downturn.
