I've been thinking about moving there to work in oil and gas for a couple of years. Just get a sales job or something and make a boat load of cash off this boom and then move away back to real life after that. Anyone else?
I've been thinking about moving there to work in oil and gas for a couple of years. Just get a sales job or something and make a boat load of cash off this boom and then move away back to real life after that. Anyone else?
This was just one of the many rumors thrown into the echo chamber. Not every person who moves to ND can just walk up and get an oil job, let alone make 6 figures. If you notice, it's always "a friend of mine" who gets these jobs when you hear about them from someone. That's the equivalent of those bar sages talking about "back in the day when they caught that 100 lb cat fish". Spoiler, if it ever happened, that person was 10 people removed from it, and all the details were inflated.
thinking of jumping in wrote:
I've been thinking about moving there to work in oil and gas for a couple of years. Just get a sales job or something and make a boat load of cash off this boom and then move away back to real life after that. Anyone else?
It might work out for you, but you are definitely late to the party.
http://www.alternet.org/fracking-towns-desperate-laid-workers-they-dont-tell-you-its-all-lie?src=newsletter1033993Didn't Cabada try this for a short time?
It is a down time in the oil and gas market. But it is temporary. Demand and supply will get sorted out in about a year or so.
Most of the six figure oil and gas work that is blue collar is very difficult and dangerous work. Talk to someone who works on a rig and they will have at least seen one very serious on the job injury/accident or know someone who had one. And those same folks probably have had two to three minor injuries over the course of a year that required medical attention. There are a zillion different ways to fall, get hit with something, strain something or have something break that causes an injury.
Also, the work is not always dependable. A lot of the work is temporary. Oil workers frequently go from one job working for a few weeks to not working for a few weeks and then another job for a few weeks. The time on is grueling. You will hear people talk about working "7 12s" a lot. That means working twelve hours a day, seven days a week.
Then, if you are working, you will get fleeced by locals for everything you need. Housing costs are high for "man camps" (i.e. very minimal mobile/trailer apartment). Groceries and restaurants/food are expensive due to all the workers flush with cash.
But, if you can handle the work and are smart, you can move up the food chain. I know a guy who moved up to project manager and then a regional project manager at a mid-sized energy company. He makes @$300k a year with a very unimpressive bachelors from a crappy state school.
Again, that's so far from typical... And no one cares where you graduated from at that point. I graduated with a horrible GPA from a small state school, and all of my success has been attributed to taking good opportunities and not being afraid to jump (as well as a ton of hard work and luck). Those "my friend made 300k" stories are a dime a dozen, yet in reality are rare as hell.