Engineer Moving to Refinery Operator Role 3

[eduardoeh]

Hello everyone,

My career as a mechanical engineer has been mostly in the EPC, mainly fabrication in O&G. Working with packaged equipment, pressure vessels, piping and structural for upstream and midstream onshore facilities. My previous employer was not any major coporation but a family business. Having only two years of experience I've had a very hard time in looking for jobs, either too much for entry-level or to little for mid-level. I've also looked outside O&G. So, for the past months I have been applying for an operator positions at refinery/petrochemicals around Houston in order to get my foot in there and then move up into an engineering position. Has anyone done this before? Is it a good idea? What other avenues may I be promoted to into as a operator, I am open to other roles not specifically engineer?

FYI: I got invited to take an assessment test for Valero as a refinery operator trainee.

 

[jari001]

If you become an operator, you could advance through operations management (supervisor, foreman, etc). I would think it would be hard to move into an engineering role unless the company has precedent of doing this (a sort of training routine for newbies) or it is somewhat a norm in the O&G industry. The experience you gain as an operator would be good if you could use it bolster your process knowledge, which you could leverage to interview somewehre else as an engineer. That's just my two cents.

 

[moltenmetal]

It will be great experience for the next time you get a chance to use your engineering degree, i.e. the next time O&G comes out of the doldrums- but that might be a while. A long while. Try it, but don't stay too long unless something more interesting and engineering-intensive is on the immediate horizon.

 

[wtxhorsman]

As big as the area is where are you looking for positions? Baytown/La Porte have fairly big demand for piping engineers and open positions will really pick up in the new fiscal year around mid-October early November.
Energy corridor around Katy seems to have positions sporadically and there are always companies out of the ship channels. I'd recommend networking with recruiters to help open doors. Some places to start with for oil and gas would be Michael Page, Meador Staffing, Burnett Specialties, etc. We have a large list of options around here and you can specify an area you would like to work to avoid from driving from North Houston to South Houston or East to West, which on a good day can take an hour on a bad day 3 or more.

 

[Murec]

If you can live with the shifts, why take a pay cut and go back from operator to engineer?