Where in the World Will We Find Our Future Geoscientists?: One Employer's Perspective

The challenges we face in finding and developing new energy resources to satisfy increasing global demand are driving us to update the attributes we seek in our entry-level Geoscientists. These attributes include a foundation of necessary technical talents and skills, as well as experimental approaches and geographic considerations. The resulting changes to our entry-level "demand profile," when convolved with the current global academic Geoscience landscape, present opportunities for development of alternative paradigms in how new Geoscientists are developed. While we have always stressed the need for strong, "classical" Earth Science fundamentals in our campus hires, both exploration and production business challenges point the way to an even greater emphasis on quantitative skills. For instance, accurately imaging deep structures overlain by highly complex salt strata in the Gulf of Mexico will require people who can balance an understanding of sedimentological and deformational processes with and understanding of the physics of wave propagation. Our experience has been that there are relatively few academic programs that stress both classical Geology and high-end quantitative skills for their graduates. Since we are in the business of remotely predicting subsurface conditions better than we ever have before, how well students are prepared in their approach to experimentation is ever more important to us. How well do students understand the systemic context of their work? Do they employ an approach characterized by multiple working hypotheses? How well are such hypotheses constrained by existing knowledge from other workers? Are their experiments well-designed and controlled such that some hypotheses can be unambiguously ruled out? Geographically, the locations of our resources and production will continue to shift away from areas like the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Since our research facilities and various centers of expertise reside in the US, we will continue to hire a high percentage of our Geoscientists in the US for employment here. However, decreasing internal demand for Geoscientists from Canada, Australia, and Europe will mean that our focus in these areas will largely shift to filling positions in our US research center and centers of expertise for which qualified US graduates cannot be found. As the proportion of our resources and production shifts into other areas, demand for highly qualified Geoscience graduates from these areas increases. Often, Geoscience departments in these areas are in an early stage of development. As many mature Geoscience departments face profound challenges from decreasing enrollments and funding, there is potential for "win-win" situations in which such departments work with governments that are interested in accelerating development of their academic institutions.