Looking for Work: Online, Email, Radio Silence, Employment Scams, and Other Strange Realities in 2016

Looking For Work: Online, Email, Radio Silence, Employment Scams, and Other Strange Realities in 2016

I have yet to have any income in 2016. Although I still have cash flow and retirement savings I can tap into the situation is getting worrisome so I am looking for work, basically any reasonable work. Although there have been a few times over the last 24 years where I have considered changing positions and have done so I have not really been thoroughly in the job market for 24 years. Even now I have some future work lined up for my consulting business and several other ‘maybes,’ but that is in the future. After I got my college B.S. degree I began typing up my resume and cover letters specific to each company and sending them off in envelopes. Sometimes these were for advertised jobs and sometimes just inquiries to see if a position was available. This was in the early 90’s when many of the EPA Superfund Sites provided work for environmental consultants. I had interviews, even a few 2^nd interviews but did not land a position. Typically, I got a polite response via snail mail that said thanks for your interest and we will keep your resume on file should a position come up. Then we moved to West Virginia and I landed a mudlogging job with a phone call. Other work came through networking within the oil & gas industry until I started a consulting firm in 2008, coinciding with the shale boom. With the current down-cycle there is no work until the market rebalances. This is true for a lot of oil and gas people these days.

Here and now in 2016 it is typical that I send targeted cover letters along with a resume to various companies in the oil & gas, environmental, and geotechnical fields to express interest in jobs from entry-level to senior level. This is all now done online. It is also now typical that there is no response – at all. Radio Silence. I also get contacted by prospective clients for work and to bid on work. Often these end up in radio silence as well as projects have gotten delayed indefinitely in the current market environment. I did get one response to a ‘resume send’ to say that the job has been filled. One. As the owner of a consulting business with an updated website I get a fair amount of job inquiries from other geologists, engineers, and other oilfield personnel – from around the world. They send me resumes. I can say that each one does get a return email within 24 hours and I have stayed in contact with a few of these people. Business networking social media sites like LinkedIn are also great for keeping in contact. I hired one subcontractor for a project who had contacted me on LinkedIn looking for work. He had great qualifications and did a great job on the project. I believe that every business contact is potentially important. Perhaps some people are just so overloaded with inquiries that they can’t respond to all of them. After all there are quite a few people looking for work in the earth sciences fields. However, I doubt it. It takes just a few minutes to compile and send an email, if that. 

Thinking more in the short-term I have decided to just settle for low-wage work for now, if I can find it. I have had many different jobs before my industry employment working in factories, assembly, light industrial, warehouses, loading trucks, janitorial, concrete inspection, and many, many, more. I am older now but still in pretty good physical shape. Unfortunately I don’t have certifications, although I am currently studying to take the test to be a P.G. which might help in the next downturn but I am not in a big hurry. I used to work for so-called “temp” services so I recently filled at an application for a local one – I think I wrote my name, address, phone #, and SS # about 15 times on the same paperwork – talk about redundancy. 

I have been watching for positions on the on-line employment sites: Monster, Career Builder, Indeed, Glass Door, etc. I have uploaded my resume. Now I seem to get several emails stating that my resume has been reviewed and I have been chosen for a position. At first these sounded legit but after a few times and some interaction they are found to be scams. I am getting quite a few of these. I got several of them after answering Craigs’s List job adds – something I would not recommend. According to Google some of these scams could involve criminal activity. Humans can be pathetic. Beware!

While I understand that the future is uncertain, I am confident that something will come up eventually, especially as the oil and gas market rebalances. Unfortunately, this has been a painfully slow process. On the bright side every job opportunity no matter how small is a chance to learn something new and network with more people, right? 

It seems that most of the jobs I have seen advertised in my profession are either senior level or entry level. Either they want a superman with an M.S. at minimum and ten years as a project manager or they want someone with no experience or one year experience. Perhaps I am exaggerating but good fits seem hard to come by. I worked with a recruiter for a short time considering jobs in the past, not a bad experience but I decided to stick with my successful consulting company which will return to success at some point but waiting doesn’t pay the bills.

With more and more automation the need for workers in many fields is decreasing but there is a need for people to analyze the data gathered by the automation. With more regulation in oil and gas theoretically there should be work in LDAR, air emissions assessment, and regulatory compliance. I am not sure if there is. A fully automated society with less required human workers would theoretically need to provide some sort of wage for the people so perhaps our machine successes are leading us to some socialistic type of future. Post-capitalists and those who tout ‘digital disruption,’ other disruption and innovation seem to think we are headed that way. But that would seem to be very complicated. Perhaps the corporate focus on quarterly profits that came about in the 1980’s to improve investment income was a mistake. Perhaps companies focus too much on the short-term and not enough on the long-term. Growth is not the only goal in business, right. Personally I like John Mackey’s and Raj Sisoda’s book – Conscious Capitalism – as a good approach to business: focus on growth is fine but not without focus on all stakeholders including suppliers, employees, competition, the general public, and the environment. They make a very case that the companies who do focus on all stakeholders will be the most successful in the long run.