Oil and gas projects are often built on the work of expert consultants. Whether it’s the technical expertise of someone who’s reached the top of their discipline or the people skills to break through a difficult deadlock, consultants bring the external perspective that tricky projects so often need to come to fruition.
If you’re thinking about becoming a consultant, making that transition from your current role is a serious commitment. Being a consultant draws on a much broader set of skills than the role of a manager or a single discipline expert, and is anything but a stepping stone between your last role and retirement.
Do you know why you want to be a consultant?
Before you start looking at what you need in order to be an upstream oil and gas consultant, it helps to begin by understanding why you want to be a consultant in the first place.
There are plenty of reasons why transitioning into the life of an oil and gas consultant is attractive. For example:
- The variety of projects to get involved with
- The autonomy to pick and choose clients
- A better work/life balance
- The chance to broaden out after a career in one specialism
At Rockflow, we often see people looking to become a consultant because they’re at a turning point.
They’ve spent their career-to-date moving up the ladder, becoming more and more of a master in their particular field, and now they’re looking for something different. There might not be an opportunity for them to continue progressing in their company or elsewhere, or they might be wanting to expand their horizons rather than keep practising as a master of one.
However, it’s a double edged sword. Consultancy can be an unpredictable venture. You don’t always know what projects are coming or what you’ll be working on from one week to another, and if you’re an independent consultant you might have to prepare yourself for gaps in your income.
More than that, it’s a very difficult life for some to adapt to. You have to know thyself – are you really an advisor by nature? Or do you prefer to be in charge?
If you decide you’re committed – and you really do need to be committed – to being a consultant, then you can start to ask yourself some of the other questions: How many days and hours do you want to work? Are you okay to travel internationally? Do you want to be in the office or be at home? Independent or part of a team? These will help shape your options as to the kind of consultant you can be.
What skills does a good consultant need?
Many people will imagine the life of an O&G consultant to mostly be one of sharing sagely advice, but as a consultant you’re going to need far more than a well of learned-wisdom.
To succeed out there as a consultant you need a very broad set of skills. Skills you might not have encountered naturally while working in, say, a traditional petrophysics or geomodelling career. You’re going to need to have honed your project management, conflict resolution and your ability to sell yourself.
1. Entrepreneurial skills
Let’s start with perhaps the most important skill an upstream oil and gas consultant can have, and perhaps the most overlooked – your skill as an entrepreneur.
If you’ve spent your career advancing in a technical role, it’s likely you haven’t had to do anything particularly entrepreneurial before. After all, petroleum companies don’t have to convince people they need oil.
But as a consultant – particularly if you’re going the independent route – you have to be able to sell what you do and why people need your expertise. When you were an expert or leader in an operator, what did consultants offer that would convince you to engage them, and do you want to be on the other side of the fence?
You might start out by working the contacts you already have, but as soon as you want to branch out or as your contacts retire, you’ll need to sell yourself to new people to build up a bigger network. Do you have the time and inclination to market and promote yourself?
2. Project management skills
As a consultant, you’ll usually be much more involved in project management than you were as a single discipline expert.
At a minimum, you’ll need to be able to estimate how much a project is going to cost, how long it’s going to take and what’s needed in order to meet each milestone and deadline. You’ll also need to make sure that everything you deliver is necessary and adds value to the client.
It’s also worth noting that while consultants need project management skills, this doesn’t make them managers. One of the most challenging elements of consulting is that even though you may have given your best advice to a client, they may say “thank you, but we’re doing something else”. A consultant, after all, is a support role rather than a commander, and so you can’t hold any baggage when your ideas aren’t carried forward.
3. Problem solving skills
As you work with the various people involved throughout an oil and gas project, problem solving will inevitably need to be part of your consultant’s toolkit.
There are two kinds of problem solving you’ll need to be prepared for. One is finding solutions to practical, often technical, problems that crop up through the course of developing an asset. This includes solving discrepancies between different data sets, pinning down what kind of maps and models are needed to understand a field, or deciding the best way forward if an asset doesn’t line up with expectations once development has started.
Sometimes the value of a consultant’s expertise and independence lies in your ability to help the client work out what problem really needs solving and how to communicate this internally.
The other kind is conflict resolution. Although upstream oil and gas is a highly technical field, it’s also governed by human relationships – and when there are high financial stakes involved, human relationships don’t always run smoothly. Part of your role as a consultant is getting people to work together, to find solutions and compromises when teams are at loggerheads, and combine your fundamental technical knowledge with emotional intelligence.
The value a consultant brings here is in their experience and perspective. You’ll have seen plenty of these same problems in your past, and you’ll have a broader perspective because you’re sitting above the issue rather than being in the thick of it, and you can appreciate when different disciplines need to work together to bridge the limits of their individual knowledge.
What does it take to become a great consultant?
In many ways, the life of an oil and gas consultant can be summed up with two words: client service. Technical expertise and industry experience is obviously important, but if you can master client service, that’s when you’ll have people and firms coming back to hire you again and again.
For some, this can be the hardest aspect of the transition. Taking a call in the middle of the night is often the reality of being an adviser. It might be 11pm for you, but if there’s an issue with a project in Ecuador that needs your attention, you need to be prepared to give them an answer. The best consultants will take this in their stride.
The greatest consultants we’ve seen, both in our own team and elsewhere, are people who had risen to the top in their chosen discipline and weren’t seeking further personal achievements. Instead they were looking for a way to give something back to the industry.
At Rockflow, we’re rarely hiring for specific roles in our consultant team. We’ll often fit a role around a person’s talents, but what we’re really looking for is this capacity for service.
Being a consultant can also be an opportunity to work with some of the best people in the business.
For many of us at Rockflow, what we love most about our work is not the freedom we’ve gained in our years as consultants, but the quality of the people we now get to work with.
Everyone here is a master in their field of expertise – whether it’s as a management advisor, a technical expert or an expert witness. And we all get to glean from one another, combine our efforts, and succeed together. It’s far from the easiest path we could have taken, but it’s one of the most rewarding times of our careers.
To get more understanding about life as an oil and gas consultant, take a look at our article on how Rockflow consultants deliver the best client service, or learn more about Rockflow’s multidisciplinary team.
