Shaping the Future Workforce: Challenges and Strategies

The currently skewed age distribution of oil and gas industry geoscientists, and the associated high number of retirements anticipated over the next few years, provides a unique opportunity to reshape workforce diversity. ExxonMobil is taking a global approach to designing and achieving a broad range of attributes and capabilities within its population of new Geoscience employees. While ensuring all potential employees meet high technical and leadership standards, we also aim for diversity in nationality, gender, and ethnicity. Achieving an ideal “portfolio” of new Geoscientists is complex, especially given the dependencies between the various key attributes.

ExxonMobil has adopted four strategies to ensure achievement of our diversity goals. Firstly, we have centralized our global Geoscience hiring to ensure we capture the top talent globally, and to facilitate effective global stewardship and accountability of results. Secondly, we have globalized the search for Geoscience talent, in order to achieve greater cultural diversity, find people with scarce skill sets, and to meet staffing needs for our local subsidiaries. Thirdly, we employ a “broadband” approach to attracting and evaluating candidates, ensuring our focus goes beyond petroleum-related programs and by participating in premier, non-petroleum events like the annual meeting of the GSA. Fourthly, we are making long-term investments in educational programs to address gaps between our “ideal” future hiring needs and existing candidate availability on campus.