Analyzing the Roles and Competence Demand for Digitalization in the Oil and Gas 4.0 Era

Abstract

The rapidly moving technological advances have forced key industrial sectors to accelerate their digital transformation processes. Despite the growing interest of organizations on investing in technological advances, the Oil and Gas (OG) industry is losing ground on the digitalization race. Except from the technological inhibitors, the relatively slow transition is related to human capital and the lack of skillful workforce able to fulfill emerging digital job positions. Additionally, the empirical evidence indicates a knowledge gap regarding the current demand for OG digital experts and the associated responsibilities and competencies. The objective of this study is two-fold: First, we investigate the status of the OG labor market digital career opportunities. Second, we shed light on the most prominent digital job roles and the corresponding skillsets, so as to design competence maps with interrelated technological skills. To meet our objectives, we analyzed 1999 job openings from three well-known OG job boards through a framework augmented with natural language processing and graph theory community detection methodologies. The findings for emerging technology trends constitute an empirical benchmark for a wide range of target groups that are interested in acquiring knowledge related to the state-of-the-art digital demand and the endorsed competencies in the uprising OG digitalized era.