The oil & gas and chemicals industry may face a people shortage as technology advances, according to the EY Future of Energy Survey.

New tech is emerging at a rapid pace, and it’s getting hard for employees to keep up, the services firm said in the report released March 3.

“Companies must prioritize comprehensive reskilling initiatives that equip employees and foster a culture of continuous learning—equipping the workforce with new capabilities and mindsets to work in entirely new ways,” the report said.

Even as they keep spending on tech, companies haven’t seen the results they were seeking, the survey showed. Just 27% said emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence are delivering on their promise.

That number is showing the industry’s need to develop people’s skillsets to get the most out of digital advances, said Tim Haskell, a leader in people consulting for the energy sector at EY.

The skill gap runs across the industry, and individual efforts to close it don’t add up to a plan, Haskell said.

“Organizations need to build a continuous learning capability into their organizations,” he said. “Too often, companies look at this as training, and training is invariably treated as a cost center.”

Companies also need to build on small successes, he said.

"One of the biggest barriers is being able to move from a single use case to organizational scale,” he said. “It's in part because companies incubate these technologies in these small silos and they don't make it an enterprise.”

As energy companies require more technology expertise, they’re also joining a larger competition for people.

“Their talent competitors are much greater than they used to be,” Haskell said. “It used to be, Exxon Mobil was competing with BP. Now you're seeing people from petroleum engineering backgrounds get hired by places like Amazon or Microsoft.”

The report said the industry prefers established practices to innovation. Haskell noted there’s a reason for that: the emphasis on safety in a business that uses heat and pressure to transform and transport millions of barrels of combustible liquids every day.

"It's only natural for any oil and gas and chemical space,” he said. “You want a proven process that drives predictable results and delivers an outcome safely and reliably. And when you're talking about some of these technologies and driving innovation, there's sometimes a lot of uncertainty.”

True Global Intelligence, the in-house research unit of public relations agency FleishmanHillard, conducted the online survey of 508 industry employees for EY. EY reported 35% of the respondents were from the U.S., 23% from Europe, Middle East and Africa and 21% from Asia Pacific.

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