Career Story: 13 Years in Oil & Gas – Reflections on the Beginning
Jarus
(First written on LinkedIn 24 June 2021)
Working on my PC this evening, my eyes strayed to the date on the lower right corner: 24 June 2021. I felt I had missed an opportunity to write on an important date in my life: 23 June. But a day miss shouldn’t matter.
This month makes it 13 years that I have been working in Nigeria’s oil & gas industry.
How did it start?
Up until my 2nd year in the uni, my dream was to become a banker. Somehow, in my 2nd year in the university, the dream changed. I wanted oil & gas. O&G is an industry, not a profession. The profession is petroleum economics or oil & gas accounting or oil & gas taxation or energy analysis or every other profession with relevance to O&G oil & gas (and almost every profession is).
But what aspect of oil & gas? I really didn’t care. I just wanted oil & gas. This was 2002/3, my 2nd year in Ife.
Maybe winning Chevron scholarship fueled the idea. Really cannot say.
I knew oil & gas was Nigeria’s most competitive industry. I knew the competition was going to be stiff. I put extra efforts into the studies. A 2:1 or a first should be able to get me job test invites in the oil industry (tbh, the former grade never came to my mind, it wasn’t an option).
Nov 2006. Graduated. The journey began. As oil firms hardly recruited pre-NYSC, I decided to spread the tentacles across all sectors. After all, anything pre-NYSC was going to be temporary. Mid-size investment firms were the major recruiters of pre-NYSC at the time, so it was no surprise that I had an offer from one, less than 5 weeks after writing final papers in the university.
A couple of months there before NYSC threw me to the core northern state of Sokoto to teach in a public junior school.
Felt underutilised in the caliphate state, decided to enrol for ICAN – the exam that turns you into an accountant.
As NYSC wound down, the real search for oil, or well oil job, began. Between Jan and April 2008, did the job tests of at least 3 oil coys. Returned to Lagos with my NYSC certificate 8 May 2008. Already in stage 2 of the recruitment process in one of major IOCs.
While this IOC process was taking long, an email flew in from Oando scheduling me for a test on 30 May 2008.
The email was followed with a phone call that if you passed the test, you should be ready for interview few days after.
Well, everything went well. By 16 June, had Oando offer in my hand. Everything from job test invite to receiving letter lasted 16 days!
16 June was also the date fixed for the final stage of that IOC with the long process.
Torn between resuming at Oando or flying to Warri. Chose a bird in hand.
That was the beginning of my oil & gas journey. 4 years in Oando with downstream posting and, wanting to test other streams of the industry, moved to Seven Energy on 2 May 2012.
Evolved with the company and now with another company that took over some of the company’s assets. Learnt a lot in the past 7 years of my 2nd journey. But that’s a story for another day.
Happy anniversary to me.
It good to never give up on one’s dream,and also this life is full of challenges, for every victory in life history need to happened, thanks l’ve alot on how to move on in life with my vision though the journey may be tough.