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Experience Counts For Petrochemical Jobs.
If you are looking for a new petrochemical job, or looking for your first job in the petrochemical industry then your experience is what will take you to the front of the queue. There are thousands of petrochemical job vacancies and they are coming up all the time. Petrochemical jobs are as close to recession proof as it is possible to get because the demand for oil and gas if huge and growing. Thus companies in exploration, drilling, processing, distributing and all the support industries to oil and gas are always in the hunt for skilled and unskilled people to fill petrochemical job vacancies.
The work, particularly offshore, is hard, the hours long and antisocial, thus the turnover of people is high. The rewards are of course well above average. All this adds up to a petrochemical job market full of opportunities. This is even more so at these times of redundancy and unemployment in other labor market sectors.
Looking for proven experience. Petrochemical employers and the specialist recruitment companies that channel people to them, first and foremost, look for people with proven experience. Not necessarily in the petrochemical field but definitely in the filed of the target job. For example you would not be taken on for a drilling crew team member if you have never been on an oilrig before. But if you have for instance, crane operator licenses then there may well be a petrochemical job for you in this skill set.
Look to the STARs. The key question for petrochemical job candidates is ‘how do I best show my experience, so that I land that well paid job’? The answer to this question is in the S.T.A.Rs. S.T.A.R is a acronym that can get your CV noticed and make you an outstanding interviewee. The acronym stands for situation or task, action and result. It is a method to express your work experiences that best sells you to prospective employers.
Compare these two statements:
“We were the construction team that brought the stadium in on time and to budget”.
Or:
“I worked 24/7 for 2 weeks as the team leader of the crane crews to complete the stadium build in the final month of the project. I am proud that we met the deadline and $50,000 under budget too”.
Which do you think will most impress an interviewer? The first one is vague and generalized and does not tell the listener anything new, whereas the second one is a STAR. It describes the situation or task…final stage of a stadium construction. It describes what the candidate actually did…team leader on cranes and long hours. It describes in measured terms the results of the actions…On time and under budget.
When faced with a choice between two candidates for a petrochemical job the job will go to the one that can best demonstrate their experience with STARs. The message for people looking for a petrochemical job is to rewrite their CV in terms of STARS and to begin thinking of their track record in the STAR format in preparation for all those interviews that their new CV will get them to.