Click here for a full list of our disciplines
 
Upcoming Events
 
Employer Tips
 
Expert Club
 
Career Advice
 
About Us
 
Contact Us
 
Volume 17 • Issue 2 • March 2017
 
Our Perspective


When companies experience a reduction in workforce, it is easy to forget the staff left behind. But now it is extra important to pay attention to those who have to pull their weight a little bit harder after a painful separation from colleagues and friends. Here are a few simple ideas and steps to take in order to make sure that your employees come out well from this stressful situation.

Here is a fresh look at how to assess your career. Do you think of your career as a potato or as a truffle? Confused? Read our take of how you can take your career to another level if you want to do it!

Please keep in touch and let us know how you are doing in these improving times.

Your friends at Collarini



Upcoming Events^ Back to Top

AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibit

George R. Brown Convention Center
Houston, Texas

April 2-5, 2017
 
OTC 2017

NRG Park
Houston, TX

May 1-4, 2017



Employer Tips^ Back to Top

After the Downturn Your Staff Needs a Lift


Together with everybody else we are hoping for brighter days ahead for the oil and gas industry. And the news appears to be positive: prices are stabilizing, deal flow is improving, and many distressed companies with good assets have lined up new capital to help restructure. These have been trying times for you and your organization. The staff who remain have been affected in many different ways, personally and professionally. Now is a good time to provide an organizational spa treatment to your employees so they can revitalize and help make your company prosper as we move into better times.

Here are five ideas that could provide a lift to your workforce, as you plan ahead for the next round of activities.

Tidy up and Revamp. If your company has seen reductions across multiple departments, then you will probably see areas where people used to work and where a vacant chair could leave a feeling of loss for those who remain. Try to consolidate work responsibilities and reassign the duties among the current staff in such a way that former employees do not leave an invisible presence. This will avoid feelings like "Oh, that used to be done by Lilian, but she is no longer here."

Begin an Internal Info Program. If you do not have one already, start an internal company news program to keep employees informed about company matters, new business ventures, and changes in management that may affect employees positively. After a slowdown, employees want to feel engaged, and advising them of what's going on around the company can go a long way. Accentuate the positive!

Seek Outside Points of View. Together with your own news about the organization, information provided by friends of the company and service providers in lunch-and-learn meetings could be received well. People always like to know how others are faring in our industry, and this is a good way to provide an outside point of view and employee growth as well. The meetings could be about new areas of business, new technologies, or new developments in benefit programs. Financial advisors, for example, will probably be happy to talk about specific trends in the investment community, and your employees may appreciate some tips for planning their 401(k).

Consider Benefit Adjustments. Talk about benefits: why not ask your HR manager to come up with some inexpensive and easy enhancements to your company's current plan that could be implemented without too many hassles. If you can make improvements, be sure they are communicated clearly and positively. You do not want to introduce a new benefit and tell everybody in an impersonal email. Have a meeting and take the opportunity to communicate another good thing to your employees!

Training. In the wake of the work force reduction, some, if not many, of your employees may have to take on additional duties in areas where they are not experienced enough. Offering courses and highlighting the opportunity to improve on an employee's career is a fantastic motivation tool! Your employees will appreciate the chance and redouble their efforts in a position with enriched responsibilities.

These are just some ideas in a world of many. We hope you come up with other ways to help your employees help your company move full speed ahead! We look forward to hearing from you and the ideas you turned into action.




Expert Club^ Back to Top

The following biographies are just a small sampling of the kind of talent available in our talent pool of over 24,000 experts. Please call our placement managers if you are interested in learning more about these professionals, or check out our website for more candidates.

Reservoir Engineer with a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering and 34 years of experience working for mid-sized to large independents and major E&P companies. Expert in reserves reporting including SPE reserve guidelines, technical team training, and SEC regulations. Also experienced in managing SOX-compliant processes, creating quarterly and annual reserves position materials for management, assisting internal and external auditors, developing and maintaining official documentation, and conducting annual and interim reserve reviews with asset teams. Geographic areas worked include Louisiana, Texas, the Gulf of Mexico, Trinidad, South America, and West Africa. Software proficiency in VOLTS and PEEP. Language fluency in Spanish. Ask for R201

Reservoir Engineer with a master's degree in petroleum engineering and more than 15 years of experience working for mid-sized to large operators and an energy company. Experienced in reservoir management, field development planning, reserves booking, prospect evaluation, reserves estimation, production optimization, economic evaluation, and risk analysis. Geographic areas worked include Texas, North Dakota, and Oklahoma. Software proficiency in PHDWin, Peep, Spotfire, Eclipse, WellView, OFM, PROSPER, MBAL, GAP, Harmony, Carte, petroLook, PowerTools, and Enersight. Ask for R1240

Geologist with a bachelor's degree in geology and 39 years of experience working for large and mid-sized operators. Experienced with subsurface, stratigraphic, and seismic mapping, development and production geology, log analysis, horizontal drilling, and unconventional resources. Geographic areas worked include east Texas, north Louisiana, south Arkansas, MAFLA, south Texas, the Gulf coast waters, and the Permian, Anadarko, Arkoma, Appalachian, and Williston Basins. Software proficiency in PETRA, SMT, and MapInfo. Ask for G1071

Geologist with a bachelor's degree degree in structural geology and paleontology, a master's degree in paleogeography, and 28 years of experience working for major oil companies. Experienced in resource assessment, prospect identification, reservoir modeling, data integration, software development, exploration and production, and staff instruction. Geographic areas worked include the offshore Gulf of Mexico, New Mexico, North Sea, Egypt, United Kingdom, and Trinidad. Software proficiency in Petrel, FAST, RMS, EarthVision, CoViz, and Landmark. Ask for G2096

Geoscientist with 21 years of data processing experience in the oil and gas industry. Responsibilities included supporting the geophysical and petrophysical staff on quality control of all data, uploading and quality check all seismic data, use of Smartfields tool to quality check all decision gates for each project, data quality management, digitizing well logs, contours, faults, shot points, leases, and coordinating all internal and external digitizing, reviewing scout tickets and reports on well log projects, checking perforations at well depths for calculations, and running calculations for well log analyst. Experienced in analyzing data problems, workflow improvement, building maps, spreadsheets, and graphs, finding duplicate wells, and completing statistical plots to find bad well elevations, locations, and well header information. Expertise in numerous software applications including Advanced Geographix, Auto Cad, GEOS Graphic, Geographix Explorer, GeoQuest, Intellex, Neurolog, NeuraSection, NeuraView, PI Dwight's, Z-Map, Datalogix, Qclogix, Petra, Tobin, Petro Log, Geo-Log, TechLog, Smartfields, 123DI, and Petrel. Ask for TG652

Production Operations Engineer with a bachelor's degree degree in engineering and 20 years of oil and gas experience working for service companies and a major operator. Experienced in optimization design, well integrity management, plunger lift optimization, well production risk and reliability monitoring, measurement and allocations, control room operation, safety training, and procedural writing. Geographic areas worked include Louisiana and Arkansas. Ask For P651

Senior Petroleum Engineer with a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering, a master's degree in business administration, and over 30 years of experience with medium sized independents. Experienced in production operations and drilling and completion design and operations including overall field management, controlling costs, increasing efficiency, and reducing surface and downhole failure rates. Also extensively experienced in management and field supervision with special expertise in artificial lift design, CO2 flooding, waterflooding, workovers, and fracturing. Geographic areas worked include Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, including the Permian Basin. Ask For P903

Financial Executive with a master's degree in accounting and taxation, a bachelor's degree in finance, and over 30 years of experience working for small oil and gas companies. Experienced in maximizing cash flow and net present value of invested capital and enterprise risk management utilizing derivatives, insurance, risk shifting, and contract negotiations. Additionally experienced in raising capital, due diligence, investor relations, financial planning and reporting, U.S. GAAP, IFRS, internal controls, human resource management, and technical systems evaluation. Licensed CPA. Ask For A754

Senior Finance and Accounting Professional with a bachelor's degree in accounting and more than 30 years of extensive experience in the oil and gas industry with both independent and public companies. Experienced in financial reporting, forecasting, budgeting, cash management, full cost accounting, risk analysis, cash flow projections, auditing, and regulatory filings with Sarbanes Oxley and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Authored a prospectus filed with a foreign stock exchange to successfully raise capital in order to take the company public. Additional experience includes set-up, documentation, and testing of internal controls and procedures for reporting to insure ethical business conduct and management of corporate insurance programs internationally and domestically. Computer skills include OGSYS, Excalibur, BOLO, and Artesia. Licensed CPA for the State of Texas. Professional memberships include AICPA and COPAS. Ask For A758


Review thousands of talented people in
more than 30 upstream disciplines at
www.collarini.com




Career Advice ^ Back to Top

Your Career: Beyond a Commodity


Here is a slightly different way to assess whether your career is heading where you want it to go. When you look it up in Webster's, you find a number of different definitions for the term "commodity." One of them reads:

"A good or service that is subject to ready exchange or exploitation within a market."

Commonly, commodities are products that are "common." They are not perceived as unique or distinct, rather they are items that can be easily interchanged without much difference in character. The distinctive factor between them is usually just price. A bag of russet potatoes of a specific type and pre-determined quality is pretty much like another bag, don't you think? Your decision to pick one bag over another will be based on cost, not on how much additional taste or nutrition they add to your table, because there is no fundamental difference between two brands.

So what if you suddenly awoke and realized your work product is a commodity? Would your career plan look different now if you were to do it over? How could you avoid that your work is too easily interchangeable with somebody else's? What would you have to do to grow your career above commodity to a highly desired, value-added level?

Here are some steps you can take to evaluate your circumstances and to grow beyond providing a commodity.

Take stock. Figure out where you fit on a scale compared to others in your profession. Ask yourself how simple it is right now for somebody else, using the same tools you do, to fulfill the demands of your position. How many resources and training hours would it take for a new person to pick up where you left off? Assessing yourself in this manner may show that you actually have special talents that make it very hard to replace you. These abilities that you bring to the table are uniquely yours; they make it harder to replace you with packaged goods, and the more unique things there are about you, the less likely it is that you are perceived to be providing a commodity product.

Quick caveat: There is nothing wrong with potatoes! It is perfectly fine, as long as you are good at what you do, to be appreciated by your supervisors who may quietly consider your work product a commodity. As long as you know that it is the choice you make as to what kind of work you wish to do. Selling commodities can be lucrative, too! Define who you want to be. Once you decide that you want to add that extra value, it is helpful to define what it is you can do to enhance your personal work product. Here is one starting point. Do you see yourself as a scientist, an engineer, or an operator? A scientist invents the airplane, the engineer builds it, and the operator (pilot) flies it. If you want to excel at what you are doing, it is important to know which hat you are wearing. Hats can be changed, but a pilot cannot be asked to invent the airplane first, you see? Be sure you know who you are, and you can continue to grow your skills above commodity level.

Understand your personal bill of material. The next decision is to clearly understand the pieces of the product that you are planning to offer to your customers, i.e. your employers. Your academic background is only the start. From there you can learn through research and observation or from a mentor you respect: somebody who can advise you with some precision about what the requirements are for your chosen field. It becomes more complicated: most careers in our industry require a minimum level of competence (the commodity level you must reach). But technology has taken us far beyond those levels and presents much larger goals to get us to the value-added level. This needs to be done with a meticulous sense for detail, especially if your talents encompass areas of growth into new technologies such as nanotechnology, fractured completions, recovery from unconventional resources, or data analytics. You should strive to reduce the ambiguity as you define what the baseline and the stretch goals of your career product should be.

Continually update and maintain. Just as will happen with a car, passing time and limited use of certain of your skills throughout your career will degrade them. You need to maintain, update, and upgrade in order for you, the machine, not to break down! Falling behind or staying in place means standing still, which means you run the danger of downgrading your work to commodity level, like a car that has sat in the garage for too long.

We hope this helps. The choice is yours to decide whether you are happy with your work being relatively interchangeable, or whether you want to try to elevate it to supply something unique, something only you can do and you are known to do best.

Let us know your thoughts.


About Us ^ Back to Top

Connecting the Industry's Experts...

Collarini Energy Staffing is a full-service agency specializing in the placement of personnel including the disciplines listed below.
Collarini Energy Experts manages projects to provide Fit-for-Purpose solutions for upstream oil and gas using these same experts.

Accounting and finance personnel
Administrative and clerical personnel
Business analysts
Civil and architectural engineers
Data Management
Drilling engineers
Drilling operations supervisors
Energy trading professionals
Executives
Facilities engineers
Geologists, geophysicists, and petrophysicists
Health, safety, and environmental personnel
Human resources personnel
Instrument and electrical engineers
IT professionals
Land, legal, and supporting personnel
Marine engineers and naval architects
Materials and corrosion engineers
Mechanical engineers
Operations supervisors
Pipeline, riser, and subsea engineers
Process engineers
Procurement personnel
Production engineers
Production operations supervisors
Project managers and support personnel
Quality control and inspection personnel
Reservoir engineers
Sales and marketing professionals
Technical writers
Technicians, drafting and graphic
Technicians, engineering and geoscience

Guiding Careers to the Next Level...



Contact Us ^ Back to Top

1500 S. Dairy Ashford Road, Suite 350
Houston, Texas 77077
832­.251­.0553

Connect With Us on LinkedIn

LinkedIn



Comments ^ Back to Top

This newsletter is produced six times per year for employees and friends of Collarini. If you would like to add a friend or colleague to our mailing list, please send us his or her email address.

If this page did not display correctly, or if you would like to be removed from our mailing list, please email: news@collarini.com.

Visit us on the web!
www.collarini.com