Energy Firms Need A Strategy To Replace Retiring Managers
From Houston Chronicle
Thousands of new workers are being hired to meet the demands of a rapidly growing energy industry. Unprecedented reserves of natural gas are being unlocked by the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, process. For decades, American presidents have forecast a time when the United States would have enough energy reserves to be free of concerns about crises in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, Africa and other parts of the world. Now it looks as though that dream may be within practical reach.
But the most pressing problem is, who will manage all of these new workers? In the next five years or so, hundreds of middle and senior managers of energy companies are expected to retire, many of them having already stayed on the job past normal retirement age. They have kept working to fill the gap left by the oil busts of ”81, ”82, ”86 and ”93, when college students avoided petroleum engineering and related fields of study because there were no jobs.
