What is a typical career path for a MWD field engineer. 2

[busta1698]

Hi all,

I just graduated university with a petroleum engineering degree, and I decided to give field work a try and be a M/LWD field engineer for Halliburton. So far all is good and I am learning tons! I like the work and am enjoying myself, but I am already looking at future potential career paths. Halliburton suggested that I make a 3 year and a 5 year plan, and thats what is bringing about all of these questions.

My question to the wise people of this forum, is what is a typical career path for a young guy like myself with an eng degree working as a MWD hand? Is it hard to make the jump to an E&P company and do office work? Can I become a company man? How often do guys cross over to DD's? Is it typical for guys to cross over and do sales?

Or am I limited to being a MWD coordinator with halliburton.

 

[kat6787]

I started out as an LWD/MWD field engineer straight out of school as well. It wasn’t with Haliburton so my experience is probably very different from yours, but I’ll throw my two cents in anyway.

I found that making a 3-year or 5-year plan was very difficult. There were around 250 (probably more) field engineers working at my location and only 5 or 6 field service manager positions, which made it very difficult to move up within the location and get out of the field.

I actually wanted to move more into directional drilling with the plan to make a jump to a drilling engineer later on. I was told that in order to do that, I would need to complete my minimum 3-years in the field as MWD/LWD first and then I would have to basically start over with the DD group and do another 5-years in the field. (The directional drilling group had longer field requirements because of the extended training).

I personally wasn’t ready or willing to commit 8+ years to field work with this particular company so I made a jump to subsea design work and haven’t looked back since. Not because I didn’t enjoy the field work or the guys I was working with in the field, but because the company had a tendency to run you into the ground until you finally broke. In the one year I was there, I spent 6 months offshore, 2 months on land rigs, and 3 months in their training academy. The other month was spent completing my required shop time training at the facility.

If you want to go into directional drilling you need to say so pretty quickly. Haliburton may be better about moving people around the different groups, but you may end up in the same boat as I did, and be looking at extended field time.

With your degree and some field experience, I wouldn’t think you would have too much trouble making the move to an E&P company as part of their wells or drilling groups. But a lot of that will depend on how well oil is doing and if people are hiring. Becoming a company man is bit different as they generally want somebody that knows and has operated just about every system on the rig. Most of the company men that I knew had worked their way up from roughnecks to drillers to tool pushers and so on until they reached the company man spot.

Cheers,
Kat

 

[DrillerNic]

Depends on the company. Some companies keep the L/MWD and the DD guys separate, so in MWD the career path is: learn and run all the tools, on harder and harder wells and then (if you want, a lot of guys don't) come into the office as the Client rep/ Service Manager/ Base Manager etc.

Other companies include L/MWD and DD is the same career path, so it's learn all the tools, learn how to be a DD and then come into the office (if you want to) to become a well planner/ client rep/ service manager.

Of course, staying within a big company like HALCO, if you want to come in to the office you have a whole host of other career paths: project management, business development, R & D....

Or you can move over to the operator, either at the wellsite as a Drilling Supervisor or in the office as a Drilling Engineer (leading to SDE, then Drilling Superintentent, then Drilling Mangaer, then....)

Speaking as a Drilling Engineer, I'd suggest the biggest questions now for you are:

1. Do you want to stay in the field, being a roughty toughty? Rotation work, good pay and the craic are all aspects that mean many people never leave the wellsite.

2. Do you want to aim for a management (as opposed to a technical) career? If you see yourself as a CEO eventually, then do your time at the wellsite and then come into the office ASAP. Personally, I have chosen to stay in a technical position (I can't really get that excited about strategy meetings and firing people and all that stuff in management). But the beauty of dayrating and contracting is that you can stay in the engineering field and still make vast quantities of cash ( and ultimately for most of us, cash is the main motivation!)

 

[DubMac]

Busta,

I got out of TAMU in 1986 w/ PetE degree and I'm not sure there was a worse year ever in the Oil Patch, certainly not since. EXTREMELY few of my fellow grads got to do what we all wanted; to become a Drilling/Reservoir/Production Engineer for a Major. Most of us knocked around with Service Companies for years, waiting on getting on with a Major. It seems like 4of 10 got on as MWD Engineers for some reason (was fairly new field back then); I know many of them still; the ones that stayed with Service Companies are now running them.

Using the field as a staging area to get to the position you really want can be very good or very BAD. Have to mimic DrillerNic here and say look at whether rotation/on call work is going to fit your life for the next 5-10 years.

The question you need to ask is: where do you want to be in 20 years?


Do you want to be in a top Management/Director position? The fastest path to the top is to stay right where you are. With your degree and some focus, you will move to the top much quicker in a Service Company; especially a HallCO or Schlumberger size company that looks for people like you to promote. The downside is you will have to do the rotation/on call deal for 5-10 years most likely. Some people hate it, some love it.

Do you really, really enjoy Engineering and want to have an office job that occasionally takes you into the field?? Then by all means try to get on with a Major or large Independent as Engineer; can't imagine it would be too hard right now. You also could get on at any EPC doing design work for the Operators; KBR, Foster-Wheeler, Bechtel, etc. all can provide either permanent or contract engineering positions if you don't want to get locked into only the OilPatch. They are always hiring young engineers.

As far as Sales, it is what I have done for the last 25 years after I finally had enough of all the joys of roughnecking. I took a job in Engineered Sales Downtown Houston selling large API pumps into refineries and such. It springboarded me into a great career being the Sales arm of manufacturing companies; still do it and love it. It would be a very easy transition for you to get into Technical Sales with your degree and experience, however, there are a lot of misconceptions about Sales.

You do not need a "Sales type personality" to be very successful. Please don't get into Sales unless you intend to be just as dedicated, knowledgeable, organized, and passionate as a brain surgeon. Engineered Sales is not about playing golf twice a week, scamming expense reports and telling jokes at happy hour. It is the ultimate performance based position and if you can't handle stress and rejection stay away.

I must say Sales may provide the most exposure to your industry however, as you are the contact point to all your company's customers, competitors, and internals. I feel you do get to see a much bigger picture in Sales, but thats just me.

SOrry for going so long, but one more point on what you are doing now. The Oil Business is as unique as it is volatile. You can definitely get pigeon-holed into a position that has no usefulness in another industry, other than basic Engineering/operations skills. How many companies use MWD's outside of the oilfield?? Make sure you get as much exposure as you can to the entire array available at Halliburton; move into fracking, cementing, wireline, etc. operations if you can.

You will do fine as long as you keep asking the questions you are asking.