What Trends Will Shape Oil and Gas Hiring In 2025?

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What Trends Will Shape Oil and Gas Hiring In 2025?

What trends will shape oil and gas hiring in 2025? That was the question Rigzone posed to Dave Mount, Executive Vice President of Louisiana-based OneSource Professional Search, a Xenspire Company, and Brian Binke, the President and CEO of Michigan based the Birmingham Group, an affiliate of Sanford Rose Associates. Responding to the query, Mount told […]

What trends will shape oil and gas hiring in 2025?

That was the question Rigzone posed to Dave Mount, Executive Vice President of Louisiana-based OneSource Professional Search, a Xenspire Company, and Brian Binke, the President and CEO of Michigan based the Birmingham Group, an affiliate of Sanford Rose Associates.

Responding to the query, Mount told Rigzone that OneSource Professional Search sees “a mixed hiring market in 2025 as several factors play out”.

“First the bad news – continuing energy sector M&A activity and larger company staff reductions … will put more qualified people on the street and also accelerate early retirements,” Mount said.

Chevron Corporation Vice Chairman Mark Nelson confirmed that the company expects to cut up to 20 percent of its workforce in a statement sent to Rigzone recently by the Chevron team. In a statement sent to Rigzone last month by the BP team, BP confirmed thousands of job cuts.

“Good news would be that 2025 will be a great year to pick up talented people who would normally not make moves from larger ‘stable’ companies and multiple deepwater projects will bring on first oil in 2025,” Mount added.

Mount told Rigzone that “more cash from new oil production, lessening regulatory burdens, and continued retirements of the boomer generation could increase hiring, albeit incrementally”.

The OneSource Professional Search Executive Vice President also highlighted to Rigzone that the company recently attended the North American Prospect Expo (NAPE), which is described on the event’s website as “the energy industry’s marketplace for the buying, selling and trading of prospects and producing properties”.

“The buzz we got from our recent NAPE attendance suggests that natural gas development is gaining interest due to expected increase in demand, due to a confluence of lifting of LNG export facility permitting bans and AI driven data center expansions … creating demand for long term dedicated supply of natural gas to fuel electricity generation facilities for new data centers,” Mount told Rigzone.

The OneSource Professional Search Executive Vice President noted that “geopolitical events will also have influence with potential (or not) peace in the Middle East and Ukraine, which may affect the world supply/demand balance for oil”.

“It will certainly be an interesting year,” Mount told Rigzone.

In his response to Rigzone’s question, Binke said “the oil and gas industry is adjusting to significant shifts as many of the most experienced professionals near retirement”.

Binke told Rigzone that he believes “this will create critical skill gaps”.

“To address this, companies should be focusing on recruiting young talent while also enhancing the skills of their mid-career professional staff,” Binke said.

“This strategy should help them merge fresh perspectives with established expertise,” he added.

OneSource Professional Search describes itself on its website as an executive and technical search firm. Mount told Rigzone that the business focuses primarily on U.S. oil and gas jobs or companies that are based in the U.S. with international operations. Mount also highlighted to Rigzone that OneSource Professional Search was acquired by Boston-based Xenspire Group in September 2024.

The Birmingham Group describes itself on its site as a top construction executive search firm. One of the company’s focus areas is oil and gas energy construction, the group’s site shows.

To contact the author, email [email protected]

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Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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