In a previous edition of Enspired–AAPG’s tech and innovation e-newsletter – I had analyzed a study that examined factors that drive individual innovation in the oil and gas industry. One subscriber pointed out that the study was conducted by the Society of Petroleum Engineers and, therefore, it likely covered engineers’ perspectives more than other disciplines. We wondered if the results would be different for geoscientists, so we sent out our own survey!
The results are in. Let’s take a good look at the demographics to get a better understanding of who is responding and what their daily jobs look like. We received a total of 57 responses. If you’re thinking, “Well, that sample size isn’t large enough,” I agree with you (and if you want to help us increase our sample sizes for future surveys, subscribe to Enspired and weigh in). But we geoscientists know a thing or two about working with sparse datasets, so we shall forge ahead.
Most survey respondents were over 50 years old and had more than a decade of work experience. Respondents were also overwhelmingly (42 of the 57) from North America, mostly the United States. As we geoscientists are all aware, age does not always correlate with seniority and managerial roles, especially within a technical field. We can climb the technical ladder and become senior geoscientists or geoscience advisers but not necessarily have a managerial or director title and responsibility level.
Results Revealed
Certain results had stronger correlations than others, and I’ve selected a few that stand out and paint a general picture from which we can draw conclusions. Perhaps these will help us chart a path forward if we want to foster environments of individual innovation.
The strongest correlation our results had was with experience, rather than job responsibilities. Overall, respondents have the skills needed for their jobs and are pulling from that skillset regularly – not necessarily developing new skills. What’s intriguing is that two of our three less-experienced respondents said they’re also conducting most of their work with knowledge they already have, not learning new skills.
Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, some of our younger and more experienced workers are expanding their skillsets, while our median experienced group is not. Maybe their daily jobs aren’t utilizing and stretching their skills, so they’re falling into some routine patterns. Fortunately, we asked a question about routines!
It looks like we have a few workers with more than 50 years of experience who are doing work that’s not routine and growing their skills regularly. When we look at what organizations this demographic is working at, we see they’re largely at consulting firms, rather than an E&P or an operator. In fact, we see a bias from independents whose employees largely fall into that middle experience range.
Our sub-decade crowd seems to have work in which they’re not learning new skills, but somehow, their jobs are not routine. This could mean we had unclear questions or they’re getting unclear direction in their work.
Overall, though, this small dataset paints a picture that our workers are doing work that is routine, not growing their skills, and those workers tend to work for independent or international oil and gas companies who should have the budget to drive innovation but aren’t. So … how can we create more opportunity to innovate in geoscience?
First, we need to determine what, if any, level of individual innovation we want and need. In this world of “do more with less,” it seems we need at least technological advancements that help our workers be more productive – even if it’s only to get their routine jobs out of the way so they have more time to build maps and think about their data.
If we’re doing routine work, we might be able to automate it instead! Work like gathering, cleaning and organizing data takes up a lot of our time, and software is literally built for those tasks. More and more, geologic software is tying into programming software like Python, and free or low-cost training is often easy to find. Employees are buying a lot of AI/ML-related software for personal reasons, so receptivity to the tech at work is likely to be high.
Given the relatively abhorrent returns from shale in the early advent of hydraulic fracturing, the industry is in desperate need of geologists ready to step out of our relegated spaces within geosteering and/or asset development planning and back into reservoir characterization and exploration roles. We need to be more vocal about the value that our skillsets bring, and nothing can do that like building a good set of graphs faster with better-quality data, thanks to today’s technology. We just need to be willing to roll up our sleeves and put in the dirty work.