Demand for Engineers-Analysis of Survey Data
Authors: Calhoun John C. 
Published: December 2007

Introduction

My purpose is to tell you what I think the data from the SPE manpower survey signify in terms of demand for the future. This yearly survey asks U.S. companies to tell how many engineers they had employed at the end of each of the 5 preceding years. and to predict how many engineers they expect to have employed at the end of each of the coming 5 years. They are asked how many engineers they hired during each of the last 5 years, how many of those were petroleum engineers, and how many they expect to hire for each of the coming 5 years. There are some auxiliary data, but basically that's the intent of the survey. This year, replies from 24 companies were sufficiently complete to analyze. However. this is not a statistical analysis because the survey is not designed on a statistical basis. This is simply a tally of those who wanted to answer. Because five of these 24 companies represented more than half the engineers. I simply want to point out that results are skewed in the direction of major companies. The survey itself showed that the total number of engineers employed reached a minimum in 1983, but that the number of petroleum engineers did not. This is in keeping with last year's survey, except that the 1984 survey predicted that the 1985 number would be downs even further. In fact, it is back up again. This, and other information, leads me to the conclusion that this 1985 survey is more optimistic than the 1984 survey was. Following are other observations about our profession's current and future manpower situation.

Manpower Survey Findings

1. Survey returns received from the 24 companies were sufficiently complete to be pooled for analysis. Of these, 11 companies reported 200 or more engineers employed and 13 companies reported fewer than 124 engineers employed at the end of 1984. Five of those companies represented 51.2% of the engineers employed at the end of 1984; seven companies represented 74.9%; and 11 companies represented 94.5%.2. The total number of engineers reported employed at year-end are given in Table 1, along with the total number of petroleum engineers employed. Peak staffing for all engineers occurred in 1982, and the low occurred in 1983 (the 1984 employment level was up again). By contrast, the workforce of petroleum engineers has increased each year, although the percentage increase from 1982 to 1983 was very low.3. Petroleum engineers are reported to comprise 37.0% of the year-end 1984 workforce of engineers, with an average of 34.2% for the 5 years covered by the data. The comparable figure from the 1984 survey was 40 %. Note that the percentage of petroleum engineers reported in the year-end workforce varies with the size of the company. Fig. 1 shows a graph of this relationship, whereby the smaller companies tend to employ a relatively larger percentage of petroleum engineers. Consequently, the percentage of petroleum engineers reported in any survey year depends somewhat on the mix of companies that respond to the survey. As reported in earlier years, the SPE statistical survey of all members shows that 39% of SPE members in engineering are petroleum engineers.

JPT

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