Adam Lichter says he spent his last year in the Newfoundland and Labrador oil industry learning to code while working on a supply ship in an oil field about 350 miles off the coast of St. John’s.
It was 2015, and he was spending his days operating autonomous underwater vehicles in the Terra Nova oil field and his nights learning programming languages, fueled by the ever-present threat of a layoff in the boom-and-bust trajectory of the sector, he said.
Lichter is one of a growing number of former oil workers who have found new careers in the province’s tech sector, working as a software developer at the smart thermostat company Mysa in St. John’s.
“Working offshore had great benefits,” Lichter, 37, said in a recent interview. “But working for the tech industry, I can go home every night and see my family. The hours are more flexible.”
Mysa is one of several tech companies showing up as examples of what’s possible in the province, often alongside local giant Verafin, which was acquired by Nasdaq in February.
In a video posted by Memorial University on Twitter on November 19, Verafin co-founder Jamie King recounted at an alumni event that his financial fraud detection company employs about 800 people, 600 of whom were from the university. . Five-year-old Mysa now employs about 100 people and last week there were 16 job openings on the company’s website.
By comparison, the Terra Nova offshore oil project directly employed 422 people as of June 30, according to a report by its majority owner, Suncor Energy. That’s roughly 400 fewer people than it employed in 2015, when Lichter was there.
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Overall, Newfoundland and Labrador offshore oil projects laid off more than 6,000 employees in the province between 2015 and 2020, according to operator reports. As of June 30, around 3,100 people were directly employed at the province’s four offshore facilities, reports show.
Jan Mertlik, co-founder of St. John’s Get Coding company, created to help fill the tech skills gap, said that about 20 percent of his students are oil and gas workers. Most of them are still working in the industry and preparing to make a change. “What we hear from them is that they feel a lot of uncertainty about the industry and the unsustainable lifestyle,” he said in a recent interview.
Robert Forsythe, CEO of dairy technology company Milk Moovement, bristles at the suggestion that switching from oil to technology is a young people’s game. He expects to hire 10-15 new people to Newfoundland and Labrador next year, and has set a goal for at least two of those people to “retrain, re-educate or upgrade their skills in other industries,” he said.
From bankruptcy to boom: #NL #oil workers finding new #careers in the technological sector of the province.
A hypothetical 47-year-old oil and gas worker from rural Newfoundland, for example, is “exactly what we had in mind,” Forsythe said in a recent interview.
“I think he plays it down a bit by saying, ‘Well, not everyone can be a coder at this age,'” he said, noting that people with marketing or project management skills are just as valuable in the new economy as coders. “Obviously, to be an operations specialist at Exxon, you have to understand how to get things done and work with a lot of different stakeholders, and that’s no different than what we do every day,” he said.
Christina Fong is a former oil and gas engineer who now works as a Customer Success Manager at CoLab Software in St. John’s. Fong grew up with oil and gas – her father worked in the industry for 40 years, inspiring her to earn a degree in mechanics. engineering at Memorial University, where job placements were often done with oil and gas companies.
She graduated in 2015 and got a job in the oil sector, but was soon retired. “I saw the rise of technology, which was not 10, 15 or 20 years ago,” Fong said in a recent interview.
It started at CoLab in 2019. The company tends to attract engineers as it creates collaboration software for engineering teams, he said.
“Myself and some other engineers who work at CoLab are constantly talking to people who want to get out of the oil and gas industry or who are in the process,” he said. Fong said he also sees more engineering students seeking job terms outside of oil and gas and within the tech sector.
For Lichter in Mysa, there is an added bonus: the company is focused on helping people reduce greenhouse gas emissions with smarter home heating.
“I am really proud to work with a company that has put such a strong focus on the environment,” he said. “It’s nice to be able to say that I’m actually doing something now to help him instead of, you know, working offshore.”
This Canadian Press report was first published on December 6, 2021.
Reference-www.nationalobserver.com