Why Energy Sector Engineering Roles Take Longer to Fill Than IT Roles

An open IT position at most companies typically closes in about 41 days on average across industries. An open engineering position, averaged broadly across every single industry that hires engineers at all, takes 62 full days, and inside the energy sector specifically, that number climbs much further still than the general average suggests. A specialized oil and gas role in Houston averaged 68 days to fill in late 2024 alone, and a senior petrophysicist position can sit open for anywhere from 140 to 160 full days before a hire is finally, actually made and confirmed. The gap between IT hiring and energy engineering hiring timelines runs far beyond a rounding error or a one-off industry quirk, and it’s the visible result of several real structural forces stacking directly on top of each other.

This post walks carefully and thoroughly through why that gap exists and keeps widening year over year: a shrinking, aging workforce with far fewer new graduates behind it, a candidate pool that’s harder to reach and less willing to relocate than it used to be, certification and safety requirements that add real time to any hiring process, and a retention problem that keeps pulling experienced engineers back out of the market almost as fast as new ones enter it. None of these particular forces exist in IT hiring in quite the same way or with the same intensity, which is exactly why the 2 fields have steadily drifted so far apart on time-to-fill over the past several years running.

TL;DR

• The baseline numbers already show a real gap. IT roles average 41 days to fill against 62 days for engineering roles generally, and energy-specific engineering roles run considerably and consistently longer still, with specialized oil and gas positions in Houston averaging 68 days and senior petrophysicist roles stretching all the way to 140 to 160 days in some regional markets.
• Energy’s talent pipeline is aging out faster than it’s being replaced. For every new entrant in advanced economies, roughly 2.4 energy workers are nearing retirement, engineering degree graduates have fallen around 25% since 2012, and several major petroleum engineering programs have shrunk or closed outright as students increasingly choose tech careers instead of energy ones entirely, year after year.
• The remaining talent pool is harder to reach and quicker to leave. Willingness to relocate for energy roles has dropped sharply in recent years, specialized engineers sit at near-zero unemployment with most candidates already passively employed, and churn rates in fields like nuclear power run as high as 58% over just 3 years, which keeps pulling experienced engineers back into the market almost as fast as new hires fill the gaps.

The Baseline Gap: What the Data Actually Shows

The overall pattern holds consistently across every single data point captured in this comparison table: engineering roles take meaningfully longer than IT roles to begin with, and energy-specific engineering roles take longer still than engineering roles in general across nearly every other industry. That steady compounding effect, general engineering already running about 50% longer than IT on average, then energy engineering running well beyond even that already-higher baseline, is what makes this particular gap worth examining specifically rather than folding it quietly into a broader conversation about technical hiring difficulty overall.

Senior and highly specialized roles push these already-wide numbers even further apart from each other across every single industry measured. SHRM’s 2025 data shows nearly 40% of senior-level positions across all industries taking 90 or more days to fill, and energy’s senior technical roles, subsurface specialists, reservoir engineers, petrophysicists, sit squarely inside that category as a matter of routine rather than as a rare exception to it.

Why IT Roles Fill Faster: A Different Talent Pipeline

IT hiring benefits from a structurally different supply of candidates than energy engineering does, and that fundamental difference alone explains a meaningful share of the overall gap between the 2 fields. Coding bootcamps, self-taught developers, online certification programs and a genuinely large existing base of computer science graduates all feed directly into the same general talent pool, giving employers multiple distinct and useful entry points into the same underlying skill set rather than relying on a single, narrow academic pipeline for every single candidate they consider. A company needing a backend developer can reasonably consider candidates from a 4-year computer science program, a 12-week bootcamp, or several years of self-directed project work built up on their own, while a company needing a reservoir engineer has essentially just 1 viable path available: a specific engineering degree earned from a specific kind of accredited engineering program before entering the profession.

Geography compounds this underlying difference considerably further still. Most IT roles can be performed remotely without much difficulty, which means a hiring manager sitting in any city can draw from a genuinely national, or even entirely global, pool of candidates without ever asking anyone to physically relocate. Energy engineering roles remain far more location-dependent by their very nature, tied directly to where the physical infrastructure, the refinery, the offshore platform, the grid substation, actually sits on the ground, which immediately shrinks the practical candidate pool down to people already living nearby or genuinely willing to move. Tech’s larger, more flexible supply of candidates, drawn from multiple distinct training paths and reachable entirely without relocation, amounts to a genuine structural advantage that energy engineering hiring simply doesn’t have access to in anything close to the same way.

The Aging Workforce Problem Unique to Energy

• Retirements are outpacing new entrants by a wide margin. Across advanced economies, roughly 2.4 energy workers are nearing retirement for every new entrant coming into the field, and in nuclear power specifically, that ratio climbs to 1.7 experienced professionals approaching retirement for every young worker entering, compared with 1.4 in grid roles and a sector-wide average of 1.2.
• A large share of the current workforce is already near retirement age. More than a quarter of the US energy workforce sits at or near retirement age today, and only 12% of the entire global energy workforce is under 30, which leaves a genuinely thin bench of younger talent positioned to step into senior roles as the current generation exits.
• The replacement math alone consumes most of the hiring pipeline. Between now and 2035, roughly 2 out of every 3 new hires across the entire energy sector will be needed just to replace retiring workers, before any actual net growth in headcount gets accounted for, which means most open engineering requisitions aren’t expansion roles at all, they’re backfills racing against a retirement clock.
• Early-career retention has weakened at the same time. The share of energy employees with less than 2 years of tenure dropped from 16% in 2012 to under 4% in 2022, suggesting that even the newer entrants who do join the field are leaving again faster than they used to, which compounds the aging-out problem rather than offsetting it.

A Shrinking Graduate Pipeline

Enrollment Has Fallen Sharply Across Key Programs The number of students graduating with engineering degrees overall has fallen by roughly 25% since 2012, and the energy-specific programs within that broader category have often fared even worse. The University of Manchester’s Petroleum Geoscience master’s program graduated 45 students in 2014 and just 23 in 2019, a decline of nearly half in only 5 years, and the University of Calgary, historically one of the largest sources of new petroleum engineers, suspended admissions to its program entirely in 2021.

Tech Is Actively Pulling Talent Away From Energy University enrollment in power engineering programs has stagnated specifically because engineering students are choosing high-tech fields like data science, software engineering and artificial intelligence instead, fields widely seen as more exciting and financially lucrative than traditional energy careers. This isn’t simply energy losing candidates to attrition, it’s energy actively competing against tech for the same pool of engineering-capable students and consistently losing a meaningful share of that competition before hiring even begins.

The Students Who Do Enroll Don’t Always Finish Petroleum engineering in particular has historically carried a high dropout rate among declared majors, with one well-regarded program reporting that fewer than 15% of entering freshmen who chose a petroleum engineering major actually completed their degree in that specific field. Combined with declining enrollment at the front end, that attrition rate further narrows an already shrinking pipeline before graduates ever reach the job market where energy employers are trying to hire them.

Why Energy Engineers Are Harder to Poach and Relocate

The candidates who remain active in the energy talent pool have become both noticeably scarcer and considerably harder to reach, which adds real, measurable time to nearly every single search conducted. Unemployment among senior reservoir engineers specifically sits at roughly just 0.8%, and subsea engineers are reported as 85% passive, meaning the overwhelming majority of them aren’t actively job hunting at all and instead have to be actively sourced and carefully persuaded rather than simply responding to a posted opening online. A recruiter working this specific market isn’t simply sorting through incoming applications, they’re building a genuine relationship with someone who has to be carefully convinced to leave a role they weren’t actively looking to leave in the first place.

Willingness to relocate, historically one of the energy sector’s genuine advantages given its many remote project locations, has fallen sharply in recent years across nearly every single segment of the industry. In traditional energy, the share of professionals willing to consider relocation dropped to 75% in the most recent measurement, down from 89% in 2022, while transitional energy saw an even steeper decline, from 87% in 2021 to 69%. Renewables followed a nearly identical pattern, falling from 85% willing to relocate in 2021 to 71%. For a sector whose physical infrastructure often sits far from major population centers by necessity, a shrinking pool of candidates willing to actually move there directly extends how long any given opening stays unfilled, sometimes by months.

Certification, Licensing and Safety-Critical Vetting

• Professional licensing adds a formal barrier IT rarely has. Many senior energy engineering roles require a Professional Engineer license, which itself demands a specific accredited degree, supervised experience under a licensed engineer, and passing sequential exams, a multi-year process that simply has no equivalent requirement in most IT hiring, where certifications exist but rarely function as a legal prerequisite to doing the job at all.
• Safety-critical roles require deeper, slower vetting. Positions tied to nuclear facilities, offshore platforms or high-voltage grid infrastructure carry consequences for error that most IT roles simply don’t, which pushes employers toward longer reference checks, more interview rounds, and more thorough verification of hands-on experience before making an offer, all of which adds real calendar time to the process overall.
• Specialized technical screening takes longer to arrange. A petrophysicist candidate might need to walk a technical panel through analysis of unconventional formation data, a process that requires scheduling multiple senior engineers’ time rather than a single technical interviewer, and coordinating that panel around several busy senior schedules alone can easily stretch a hiring timeline by several additional weeks on its own.
• Compliance and security requirements layer on top for certain roles. Some energy infrastructure positions, particularly those touching critical grid or nuclear systems, carry background check and clearance requirements that take weeks to process independent of how quickly a candidate and employer actually agree on terms, a delay built into the process itself rather than into the sourcing or interviewing stages.

Regional Concentration and Geographic Constraints

Energy engineering jobs cluster tightly in specific regions defined by where the physical infrastructure actually exists, Houston for oil and gas, particular grid corridors for transmission and distribution work, coastal areas for offshore platforms, in a way that IT roles largely don’t experience at all. That concentration means a company hiring for a specialized energy role is drawing from a genuinely local or regional labor market rather than the national or global pool available to most remote-friendly IT positions, and when the local pool of qualified candidates is already thin due to the retirement and enrollment pressures described earlier in this post, geographic concentration turns a general talent shortage into a highly localized one.

This kind of regional clustering also means energy companies operating in the same city are frequently competing directly for the exact same small pool of specialized engineers, rather than each drawing separately from a broader national market where competition tends to be far more diffuse and spread out. Houston’s oil and gas sector illustrates this dynamic clearly: senior reservoir engineers with near-zero unemployment and subsea engineers who remain overwhelmingly passive aren’t competing against a broader pool of candidates spread out across the entire country, they’re instead being pursued simultaneously by every other energy employer operating in that same metro area, which is exactly the kind of concentrated competition that extends a search from mere weeks into several full months.

Retention Churn Adds to the Hiring Burden

Experienced Engineers Are Leaving at a Striking Rate Nearly half of all power engineers changed jobs, switched employers, or left the industry entirely within just the past 3 years alone, and in nuclear power specifically, where institutional knowledge takes many years to rebuild once it finally walks out the door, that same churn rate climbs all the way to 58%. Burnout and a general lack of creative problem-solving opportunities rank among the top reasons consistently cited, which suggests the underlying problem isn’t simply that energy engineers are being lured away by better offers elsewhere, it’s that the day-to-day lived experience of the role itself is actively pushing people out of the field entirely.

Retention Pressure Is a Present Problem, Not Just a Future Risk According to the 2026 Global Energy Talent Index specifically, 85% of energy professionals say they would genuinely consider changing roles, and professionals working in transitional energy and power were approached about new opportunities an average of 6.26 separate times over the past year alone, up from 6.08 the year before that, meaning even engineers who aren’t actively looking for new roles are still being actively recruited on a near-constant, ongoing basis throughout the year. That constant, relentless outside pressure means a company that successfully fills a role today still faces genuinely real odds that the very same seat opens up again within just a few short years, turning what initially looks like a single hiring problem into a recurring one that keeps compounding steadily over time.

The Compensation Response and Why It Hasn’t Closed the Gap

Energy employers haven’t stood by passively in the face of this shrinking talent pool, and compensation is precisely where that active response shows up most visibly in the actual data. Total compensation packages for subsea engineers and petroleum data scientists rose 12% to 15% annually over a recent 2-year stretch, and sign-on bonuses, once relatively rare in these specialties, have become standard practice rather than an exceptional incentive reserved for the hardest-to-fill roles. That’s a meaningfully aggressive compensation response by almost any industry’s standards, and it still hasn’t been nearly enough to close the time-to-fill gap on its own, year after year.

The reason compensation alone can’t fully fix this comes back directly to the underlying structural nature of the problem itself. Raising pay can persuade a passive candidate to take a call, and it can help an employer win a bidding war against a direct competitor for the same engineer, but it can’t create new petroleum engineering graduates faster than universities produce them, and it can’t reverse a multi-year licensing and certification timeline for someone who hasn’t started that process yet. Money moves candidates around between existing employers within a fixed, steadily shrinking pool, but it doesn’t actually expand that pool itself in any meaningful way, which is exactly why aggressive compensation increases and a growing time-to-fill gap have been able to coexist side by side throughout the very same period.

How Project Timelines Collide With Hiring Timelines

Energy infrastructure work runs on fixed, largely immovable schedules that were often set well before anyone accounted for how long hiring specialized engineers would actually take, and that direct collision creates a kind of pressure that most IT hiring managers rarely face in anything close to the same way. A grid modernization project, a refinery turnaround, or an offshore platform maintenance window all operate on fixed deadlines driven purely by physical and regulatory realities rather than by how quickly recruiting can actually staff the project, and those fixed deadlines simply don’t move just because the labor market for the engineers needed to complete the work has gotten meaningfully tighter in the meantime.

This creates a very specific kind of pressure that actively compounds the existing hiring challenge rather than simply running parallel alongside it, unrelated. Turnarounds, outages and maintenance windows require rapid deployment of skilled field engineering professionals on a fixed schedule, but the time needed to source, vet and mobilize qualified personnel hasn’t compressed at the same pace project timelines have, which means the gap between what operations expects and what recruiting can realistically deliver shows up as real project risk rather than just an internal hiring metric. An IT project slipping because a developer role took an extra month to fill represents a real, quantifiable cost, but an energy infrastructure project slipping because a licensed engineer couldn’t be sourced in time can carry real safety and regulatory consequences that go well beyond a simply missed internal deadline on a calendar.

Why AI and Automation Haven’t Closed the Gap Either

A reasonable question worth asking directly is whether automation and artificial intelligence might eventually shrink this engineering talent gap the way they’ve already reshaped parts of other industries, but the current evidence available points toward a more complicated relationship rather than any clean, straightforward solution. Energy’s own existing workforce is growing noticeably more anxious about AI’s impact on individual career trajectories even as the sector continues to struggle filling existing roles, and the latest U.S. Energy and Employment Report continues to track hiring demand and competition for skilled energy workers across the sector. That suggests automation may be adding fresh uncertainty to an already strained talent pipeline rather than straightforwardly relieving the pressure sitting on top of it.

Part of this disconnect comes directly from what these specific roles actually require day to day. A petrophysicist interpreting unconventional formation data, or an engineer certifying that a grid upgrade meets safety standards, is making judgment calls that carry legal and physical consequences, the kind of work that still requires a licensed, experienced human signing off on the outcome regardless of what automated tools assist in the analysis. AI can genuinely speed up parts of the underlying technical work involved, but it hasn’t replaced the ongoing need for the credentialed engineer who takes ultimate, personal responsibility for the final outcome, which means the hiring bottleneck for that specific credentialed role remains largely intact and unresolved even as the surrounding tools and technology continue to change rapidly around it.

What a Longer Search Actually Costs a Company

A longer time-to-fill isn’t just an abstract statistic sitting quietly in a recruiting dashboard somewhere, it carries real, genuinely measurable costs that compound the longer a specialized energy engineering role stays open and unfilled. Every open vacancy costs an average of roughly $4,129 over a typical 42-day search across industries generally speaking, and when an energy engineering search instead runs to 68, 140 or even 160 days rather than 42, that baseline cost multiplies well beyond anything a comparable IT search would ever realistically produce.

Beyond the direct recruiting cost alone, an unfilled engineering role often means existing staff have to absorb the extra workload themselves, project timelines slip further behind, and in some cases safety-critical work gets delayed or covered instead by less experienced personnel stretched across far more responsibility than they were originally hired for in the first place. None of this shows up cleanly as a single line item on any budget, but it accumulates steadily and quietly across every additional week a specialized role sits open, which is exactly why the gap between IT and energy engineering time-to-fill deserves real attention beyond simply noting that 1 number happens to be larger than the other on a report somewhere.

What This Means for Hiring Strategy

• Treat energy engineering searches as fundamentally longer projects from the start. Building a hiring timeline around typical IT-style expectations, measured in weeks rather than months, sets both recruiters and hiring managers up for real frustration when a search that would close quickly in tech instead stretches on for the 68 to 160 or more days that comparable energy roles actually require to fill.
• Invest in passive candidate sourcing rather than waiting for applications. With specialized roles running at 85% passive candidates and near-zero unemployment among senior specialists, using experienced energy recruiters for direct, relationship-based sourcing can reach professionals who won’t surface through a posting-and-wait approach, which makes active sourcing a genuine necessity rather than an optional extra step worth merely considering once the search has already stalled.
• Build retention into the hiring conversation itself. Given churn rates running as high as 58% in demanding fields like nuclear power specifically, a successful hire that leaves again within just 2 or 3 years amounts to a delayed repeat of the same expensive search rather than a real hiring success, which makes career development and engagement planning part of the hiring strategy rather than a separate concern to address later.
• Widen the geographic net wherever the role genuinely allows it. Since steadily declining relocation willingness is shrinking the local talent pool in every major energy-producing region, roles that can reasonably accommodate remote or hybrid arrangements, even partially, open access to candidates who would never consider a full relocation but might still accept a different kind of working arrangement instead.

Comparing the 2 Hiring Environments Side by Side

Every single row in this comparison table points clearly toward the same underlying conclusion: the gap in time-to-fill between IT and energy engineering comes from more than a single isolated cause with a single easy fix, and it’s the cumulative effect of a genuinely smaller pipeline, a more concentrated and less mobile candidate pool, formal licensing barriers, and a persistent retention problem that keeps reopening roles almost as fast as they originally close.

FAQs

How much longer does it take to fill an energy engineering role compared with an IT role? Based on 2025 benchmarking data, IT roles average 41 days to fill against 62 days for engineering roles generally, and energy-specific engineering positions often run considerably longer still, with specialized oil and gas roles in Houston averaging 68 days and senior petrophysicist positions stretching to 140 to 160 days in some regional labor markets that have been closely studied.

Why is the energy sector’s workforce aging faster than other industries?
Across advanced economies, roughly 2.4 energy workers are nearing retirement for every new entrant joining the field, and more than a quarter of the US energy workforce already sits at or near retirement age. At the same time, only 12% of the global energy workforce is under 30, leaving a comparatively thin bench of younger talent positioned to replace the generation now retiring.

Is the graduate pipeline for energy engineering actually shrinking?
Yes, on several measurable fronts at once. Engineering degree graduates overall have fallen roughly 25% since 2012, specific programs like the University of Manchester’s Petroleum Geoscience master’s have seen enrollment drop by nearly half in just 5 years, and the University of Calgary suspended admissions to its petroleum engineering program entirely back in 2021, a genuinely notable moment for the field.

Why are energy engineers harder to recruit than IT professionals, even when openings exist?
Senior specialists in fields like reservoir and subsea engineering often sit at near-zero unemployment, with the large majority reported as passive candidates who aren’t actively job searching. Recruiting these engineers requires direct outreach and relationship-building rather than waiting for applications, which takes considerably more time than filling a typical IT role where more candidates are actively searching.

Does licensing actually add meaningful time to energy engineering hiring?
Yes, in a very real way. Many senior energy engineering roles require a Professional Engineer license, which itself demands a specific accredited degree, supervised experience under a licensed engineer, and passing sequential exams, a formal, multi-year process with no real equivalent in most IT hiring, where certifications exist but rarely function as a legal requirement to perform the job at all.

Why has willingness to relocate for energy jobs declined in recent years?
Recent industry survey data shows relocation willingness falling sharply across nearly every energy segment, from 89% to 75% in traditional energy since 2022, and similarly steep declines in transitional energy and renewables over the same period. The specific reasons behind that shift vary by individual, but the effect on hiring is consistent: a shrinking pool of candidates willing to move to where energy infrastructure is actually located.

How much does employee churn contribute to the longer hiring timelines in energy? Significantly. Nearly half of all power engineers changed jobs, employers, or left the industry within the past 3 years, and that churn rate climbs to 58% in nuclear power specifically. High churn means companies are frequently refilling roles they already filled recently, which adds to the overall volume of open positions competing for the same shrinking pool of qualified candidates at any given time.

Can energy companies realistically close this hiring gap with IT-style recruiting tactics? Not entirely, since the underlying causes are structural rather than tactical: a smaller graduate pipeline, formal licensing requirements, and a workforce that’s aging out faster than IT’s is. Tactics like deliberate passive-candidate sourcing and wider geographic flexibility can meaningfully shorten individual searches, but they work within the sector’s real constraints rather than eliminating the gap in time-to-fill between energy engineering and IT hiring altogether.