A New Crop Of Scientists

When NASA discontinued its space shuttle program after 20 years, it was a bittersweet ending for one of the space program’s most ambitious projects.

It also cost a lot of people their jobs.

But in some ways the timing is perfect – thousands of highly skilled employees are hitting the unemployment line just as the oil industry ramps up for another hiring spree. This serendipitous timing has not been lost on the people helping the laid-off workers find new jobs, and at the Aerospace Transition Center in Houston, helpers are actively linking former aerospace employees with their potential new employers in oil and gas.

With 70% of the workforce at the Johnson Space Center involved in some form of engineering, a transition to the energy industry is not a hard concept to grasp. Still, it’s helpful to do a skills transfer assessment before sending them out for interviews. Nancy Tootle, aerospace/energy industry workforce liaison, said her group starts by examining the tasks the employees were performing for NASA – working on control center technology, for instance, or heat and fluid dynamics for the shuttle – and breaks them down into key capabilities using the US Department of Labor format. Then they’re dissected further into detailed work activities.

“When we got to that level, it was easier to build it back up and do side-by-side comparisons with actual job descriptions that we got from Shell, Chevron, and companies like Dow Chemical,” Tootle said. She added that the biggest gap is in terminology.

Oil and gas companies have been active participants in Aerospace Transition Center job fairs. (Photos courtesy of the Aerospace Transition Center)

The job center

Workers use the Aerospace Transition Center for a variety of reasons. Veronica Reyes, aerospace transition center manager, said the center offers information on resumes, interviewing, networking, and even LinkedIn classes. “We have a group on LinkedIn, and it’s one of our primary ways of working with our candidates,” she said. “We link them directly with our employers, and that seems to be really successful.”

Additionally, job-seekers can attend local colleges through the National Emergency Grant for the aerospace industry.

Job fairs are also a key part of the program. After doing a live fair in June, the center hosted a two-week “virtual fair” in July with more than 140 employers participating. “They’re coming from a little bit of everything,” she said. “We’re seeing oil and gas, health care, and even some aerospace. But for aerospace we have to look out of state.”

Additionally, the center offers in-house training. Recently it offered a class called “Energy Outlook” that provided in-depth instruction on how to transition into the energy industry. “Dow just hired a bunch of our candidates, and they took what they learned here and how they transitioned it to Dow,” she said. “That was very enlightening.”

Energy companies active in the Houston area include Dow, Chevron, Aker Solutions, and Bechtel, she added.

The transition center is operated by Workforce Solutions, which offers free services such as job readiness and rebranding, office supplies such as computers and copiers, plenty of training opportunities, and self-service resources.

Reyes said that Workforce Solutions has well-established relationships with many employers because it works with a variety of industries. “Whenever we set up a transition center, we are bringing external companies with us,” she said. She’s also been cold-calling and meeting with additional employers, and NASA forwards requests to the center as well.

So far hundreds of displaced workers have found work through the transition center, and as word grows about the caliber of the job seekers, new companies join the hunt. Reyes said that Aker had plans to visit the center in August and potentially make hundreds of offers. The company, which started reviewing resumes prior to the event, planned to serve a catered breakfast and lunch, hold interviews, and hire workers on the spot.

“They’re not waiting to draw out the process,” she said. “They want to snatch the candidates before anyone else does.”

Shell, Baker Hughes, and ConocoPhillips also have scheduled upcoming hiring events, she said.

Companies that hire engineers are particularly interested in the Johnson Space Center employees.

Future employees

Reyes said the center is seeing candidates “at every stage of grief.” Not all of them expected to be impacted by the end of the shuttle program. Some are retiring, some are trying to parlay their skills into another industry, and some are moving in a brand-new direction – one former engineer decided to pursue a degree in communications at Alvin Community College and is now a deejay for that school’s radio station.

“He’s turned his hobby into his next profession,” Reyes said.

The candidates are also a highly skilled group of individuals who bring special talents to the job pool. “It’s amazing to have this type of talent pool,” Reyes said. “They are not in the pool because of their lack of qualification. They have longevity, experience, degrees, and background. It’s just based on budget.

“It’s put them in the limelight for other employers.”

Their skills run the gamut – engineering, software, systems, mechanical, technical writers, administration, human resources, and logistics. And having been responsible, sometimes directly, for the lives of humans in outer space, they bring a unique sense of safety culture which dovetails nicely with oil and gas.

“It seems to be an easy transition,” Reyes said. “We’ve had success stories where they’re transitioning in a day and a half.”

Tootle shared a story from BP in which a former aerospace employee was taken to an offshore facility as part of the standard training. “They figured this person wouldn’t be productive for a year,” she said. “While they were offshore, they started talking about some of the challenges they were having, and the individual over lunch came back with three technical recommendations.

“The trouble-shooting mindset is something the industry is looking for, and that’s really hard to quantify.”

Hopeful

One job candidate at the center is Teresa Freund, who hopes to find a job in the energy industry. Freund has a lengthy career working on payloads, the experiments that fly on the shuttle to and from the space station. “I’ve worked with payloads from safety to Interface Control Documents to managing contracts that processed and certified Department of Defense payloads,” she said.

She hopes to find a job in project management, she said.

The going has been slow, but she’s talked to one recruiter and felt positive about the experience. “The skills that were listed in the job description were definitely skills that I have,” she said. “The skills are transferrable. It’s just learning the new company and the new product.”

Freund said she had done some research into the energy industry and even spent some time at the Offshore Technology Conference, which she found overwhelming but exciting as well.

Ultimately she hopes to manage a team of engineers to “build something and make it work.”

“I’ve worked with engineers for several years, and it amazes me how they find a solution to a problem and make it come to fruition,” she said.

For more information about the Aerospace Transition Center, visit www.wrksolutions.com/employer/aerospace.html.