Entry Level Rig Jobs

The oil industry pays well. This is why many people want to work there. This is true even for those without a college education. So if you have a strong back but dislike the thought of going to college, working on an oil rig is the job for you. There is no other place where you can earn $40,000 to $50,000 a year doing good honest labor. Even if you want to go to college, it can be a good idea to get an oil rig job. Just one to two years of hard work could pay for your entire 4-year Bachelors degree course without your having to take out an expensive student loan.

You may wonder how to get such a job if you do not have any experience. Fortunately, like any other industry there are jobs for those starting out. You can start at the bottom with entry level rig jobs and work your way up. So how do you find these oil rig jobs which need no experience?

First of all, you need to know that there are generally three types of oil rig jobs in the United States: onshore, offshore and deep water. Onshore means oil rigs on land. While they pay better than many other jobs requiring physical labor, they usually offer the lowest wages out of all the oil rigs. There are three main reasons for this: these onshore oil rigs are usually sited on older and less productive oil fields; the working conditions are not as severe as those on board offshore oil rigs; the working conditions are less dangerous those than offshore oil drilling jobs.

“Offshore oil drilling rig” usually just means any oil rig that is not placed on dry land. It can be a jack-up rig in shallow waters near the coast or it can be a drillship working in deep waters. However, a deep water drilling rig is usually sited in waters over 1000 feet in depth. These oil rigs are sometimes built on large ships and sometimes on something like a giant barge or man-made island. There is no precise definition possible because the technology used to find and drill for oil advances rapidly, sometimes incrementally and sometimes in leaps and bounds. Most offshore oil rigs are a mixture of both old and new technologies.

As you may expect, drilling for oil in deeper waters is much harder and more dangerous than drilling in shallow waters in sight of land. Offshore oil rig jobs in deep waters usually require at least some degree degree of experience and pay much better. The $50,000 and $60,000 a year roustabout job wages you sometimes hear about are usually for these kinds of oil rigs. Work on oil platforms in shallow waters normally pay $5000 to $10,000 less.

One important point you need to be aware of is that quoted salaries for many drilling rig jobs are usually calculated on a daily rate. That’s 12-hours a day 7 days a week with no weekend breaks and inclusive of night shifts. Depending on the company, you might work 7 days, 14 days or 21 days at a stretch before you get time off. Time off also varies from one week to two weeks. A job requiring three weeks on and two weeks off usually pays more than a job requiring two weeks on and two weeks off.

One of the best way to get entry level rig jobs is to start modestly by looking for a roustabout job on a land-based oil rig. You will need to live in a state which has plenty of such oil rigs, e.g. Texas or Virginia. In good times, there will be many jobs advertised in the local newspapers. In tougher times, you may need to visit the oil fields one by one to look for roustabout job vacancies.

Once you have some experience, you can move to one of the Gulf states and look for a oil rig job vacancies. Start with drilling rigs in shallow waters, then move on to deep water rigs when you have more experience. As older oil fields on land and in shallow coastal waters become depleted, future offshore oil jobs will be in deep waters or alternative sources like oil shales and oil sands.

Many job seekers fail to find or get entry level rig jobs because they are impatient, too lazy or simply expect too much. Yes, wages are very high. But you need to work your way up from simpler rigs to more complex platforms and drillships. A job on an older oil field on land may only pay a bit more than a laborer’s job in a construction yard but can be a good way to gain much needed experience for more difficult offshore drilling jobs.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 13th, 2010 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Oil Rig Jobs Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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