In Bruce Vincent’s business, finding oil and gas beneath the
Earth’s surface can be hard. But finding the next wave of talented
employees flying beneath the radar can be even harder.
The president of the $650 million Swift Energy Co. says human
capital is the most important resource in his business today, but it’s
a resource with notoriously cyclical availability, as difficult as
crude oil to discover, refine and maintain.
“The industry has age gaps in it, and some of that relates to the
cycles the industry has gone through,” Vincent says. “If you go
back to the ’60s, the industry wasn’t doing particularly well, and
we didn’t have a lot of people going to engineering and geology
schools to come into the oil and gas industry. But 1973 is when the
embargo came and you had a significant influx of people.
“But when you moved into the mid-’80s and into the ’90s, the
industry went through a long down cycle, you saw school attendance decline, and some schools even shut down. So the industry
has an age gap particularly from the mid-30s to mid-40s. But we’re
now getting an influx of young people in the business again.”
With large age gaps in the oil and gas business, it can be difficult
to build and sustain a successful company culture. In order to rally
everyone around a single set of objectives and core values, Vincent
needs to not only overcome the natural gaps that exist between
different locations, disciplines and departments but overcome age
gaps, as well.
Vincent says getting the right talent in the door and in the right
positions is a critical first step. But if you can’t get those talented
employees aimed in the same direction and following the same set
of values, it will make the task of moving your company ahead
much more difficult.
