When you are ready to begin your new oil drilling job after graduating from your roustabout or drilling school, you may be expecting something a lot more glamorous than you really get.
The fact is that drilling is hard work, but the pay is excellent and the friendships that you make will last you your entire life.
Getting a drilling job will be easy, once you have some training, experience and determination to make it work for you.
Once you have decided to make a go of it, becoming employed as a roustabout or roughneck usually means a lot of on the job training, and you will definitely get a lot of it.
There are no real tricks to landing your first job working on a drilling crew, but having at least a training program under your belt can certainly help.
You'll find that the hard labor of drilling for oil has a lot in common with other hard jobs, but the pay is significantly higher.
You truly earn your pay though, working in the foulest weather you can imagine is just a part of the job.
But for those who enjoy working outdoors, that really isn't an issue; if you wanted a desk job, you wouldn't be drilling.
Drilling for oil certainly does pay well, but many oil rig workers find that the close knit friendships that develop when working for such long hours and in difficult conditions is an even better benefit than the money and the extended time off.
When you discover oil, the adrenaline rush is unlike anything you can imagine, and you will be sharing it with people you are close too - it's a blast.
Plus, knowing that you are helping provide for the needs of your country helps you to feel good about your work as well.
Dirty doesn't begin to describe the oil drilling jobs that you will take on.
Particularly the land based ones are going to be hot work, hard work, and dirty work.
Those old commercials featuring the cowboy are pretty close to reality when it comes to oil drilling jobs.
They just are not for everyone, and these days, it takes enough to train you and to get you moving in the right direction on your oil drilling jobs that your attitude has to be good in order for you to be taken on to train.
Helping you learn everything there is about drilling is definitely not what the rig operator has in mind, so once you are trained, they have a real investment in you.
While the roughneck training programs out there certainly can help, the real learning, as in most career paths, takes place on the job.
It is one thing to read about a blowout, and another to actually experience one, so once you are in a position to get your hands dirty and really learn the work, the gaps left by classroom instruction will be filled.
Realistically, if you're still interested in oil drilling jobs, you can find out all that you need to know by applying on a land based oil rig and working there for a while.
In many cases, the land based rigs are the same folks who will be hiring you for offshore oil work.