Oilpatch faces uphill battle recruiting skilled and unskilled workers

Companies in the oil and gas sector say they're struggling to find both skilled and unskilled workers now that activity has rebounded with oil and gas prices soaring.

"It's just unbelievable how much, how fast, it's turned around," said Calgary recruiter Shannon Warren.

He said the oil and gas industry is now rebounding after limping through nearly seven years of collapsing oil prices, an economic downturn, a recession and a pandemic that saw demand dry up — resulting in mass layoffs and employees switching sectors in order to survive.

In fact, Warren and other recruiters, managers, human resource departments and industry leaders are scrambling to attract enough workers — from highly skilled trades people and professionals to unskilled green, eager-to-learn labourers — in order to ride out the current tidal wave of activity sparked by skyrocketing oil prices.

"There's such a huge demand right now, there's so much work out there, we're seeing it more and more as the days and weeks are progressing (and) it's only getting worse," said Warren, CEO of Matrix Labour Leasing Ltd., a Calgary-based recruiter.

The problem, industry insiders believe, is threefold.

People have moved on to more stable and secure work, albeit often lower paid. People are worried about the industry's volatile nature. And people are being bombarded with messaging that says the oil and gas industry is harmful, and fading in relevance, as the world transitions to greener and cleaner sources of energy.

In fact, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently urged a group of graduating university students not to work for companies who fund the fossil fuel sector, calling that industry "climate wreckers."

"That is a very disheartening statement to be made on a world stage when that's truly not the case," said Gurpreet Lail, president of the Petroleum Services Association of Canada (PSAC). 

"Everybody's moving forward, we're all looking at diversification, and we need employees to actually be part of that movement."

And the sector needs them now, Lail said. 

Lail said she just did a quick survey of PSAC's members and discovered more than 2,000 open jobs for skilled and unskilled labourers in the energy service sector.

She said she knows companies are going to different lengths to recruit people including targeting non-traditional labour pools.