Oil Rig Jobs

What are the best ways to find offshore oil drilling jobs? Undoubtedly, the best way is to have a friend or relative working on an oil rig recommend you for an open position. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have this convenient option. So, what can you do to find yourself a job on an offshore oil rig?

1) Online job boards (e.g. Monster). One great advantage is that you can easily set up a free account on online job boards like Monster. Once you have your account, you can immediately search for offshore oil drilling jobs posted there. Unfortunately, there are 3 major problems with this approach. Firstly, almost every other job seeker is also searching for a job on these online job boards. Secondly, most job boards cater to the lowest common denominator - many non-executive oil industry jobs are not supported. Thirdly, not all employers post their jobs to online job boards. Although your account is free, employers often have to pay for their accounts either annually or monthly. Despite the disadvantages, this is still a step you need to do because big oil companies will post their jobs to online job boards.

2) Newspaper job postings. Oil companies also advertise open positions on national and local newspapers, so this is another place you definitely have to look at. Generally speaking, large oil companies will post in national newspapers, while smaller companies post in local newspapers. In other words, while you can find jobs from large companies in the newspapers, you probably won’t find jobs from smaller companies unless they have a local headquarters.

3) Share market. Look up the Wilshire stock index. This contains the 5000 largest public-listed companies in the US. You should be able to find quite a number of oil companies in this list. This method takes some work, but the greatest advantage is that almost no one else is doing it. Additionally, you will not find any fly-by-night companies or recruitment agencies here. This is straight to the source, bypassing all the middle-men.

4) Internet. Type in “oil company” (and its variations) in Google, Yahoo and MSN to get a list of possible employers. Drill down into the company’s website until you find the contact information. Just because they do not have a recruitment page, or do not have any openings listed does not mean they do not have any jobs available. It usually takes time for a vacancy to actually move its way from the field to HR to the company’s website and other job postings.

5) Oil industry recruiter. I have to qualify this one a little. I am not talking about headhunters for high-level management executives, but online agencies which help you to submit your resumes to oil companies for a small fee. There are only a few honest agencies - they actually collect a database of oil companies. When you realize that there are thousands of oil companies in the US and abroad, having this database available to you is definitely worth the small fee they charge. Each agency has a slightly different database, so I recommend that you keep track of the resumes they send out for you. Start with one agency. If it can’t produce results, then move on to the next, but only send your resume to oil companies you have not hit yet.

Use all 5 techniques together to find offshore oil drilling jobs will produce the fastest results. The first two methods produce the highest quality jobs, but also have the highest competition. Searching for oil companies through the share indexes and internet will not find you many openings, but the openings you find will have almost zero competition. The last method is probably the most productive, but you risk falling prey to scams.

RigWorker.com has been helping people get offshore oil drilling jobs since 1998.

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This article on offshore oil drilling jobs was also published on EzineArticles.com.