The hidden risk in industrial projects: The experience gap between teams
For the past few years, the conversation across refining and petrochemical has centered on one thing: the labor shortage. Finding bodies. Filling seats. Getting crews on-site.
And while that problem has not gone away, it is no longer the whole story.
Because here is what is actually happening: many owner-operators, EPCs and contractors are not necessarily struggling to find people. They are struggling to find the right people. The ones who have seen it before. The ones who know what a bad JHA looks like before it becomes an incident. The ones who can problem-solve in the field without calling a meeting first.
You may have crews. They just are not the crews you used to have.
The shift no one is talking about
The workforce composition across this industry has quietly changed, and most organizations are only now starting to feel it.
Senior leaders and seasoned field experts have retired or exited in significant numbers. The mid-level bench, historically the backbone of execution, is thinner than it has ever been. Junior talent is being elevated into critical roles earlier than anyone would have planned.
On paper, teams look staffed. But experience is not something you can see in a staffing report, and the gap between who is on the roster and who is ready to execute at this level is growing.
Where it shows up first
Turnarounds and outages are where the experience gap hits hardest. These environments have no tolerance for a learning curve. When supervision is thin, planning misses increase, execution slows and field problem-solving takes longer than it should. Schedules extend. Costs climb.
Safety exposure is the one that should concern everyone the most. Less experienced teams are not less committed to safety. The issue is exposure. Recognizing a subtle process risk before it becomes a near miss is a skill that comes from years in the field, not a training module. Even organizations with strong safety cultures are seeing increased exposure because the institutional knowledge that used to catch these things is no longer in the room.
Rework is the most expensive symptom and one of the quietest. Tasks that used to be done right the first time now require corrections. In large-scale industrial environments, small inefficiencies compound quickly.
The strain on partnerships
Owner-operators expect the consistency they have relied on from long-standing contractor relationships. Contractors are delivering with thinner, less experienced teams than they had five years ago. Neither side is wrong. Both sides are feeling it.
The result is more oversight, more friction and more pressure on relationships that used to run on mutual trust.
How we got here
Retirements accelerated sharply over the past decade. Downturn cycles pushed experienced talent out of the industry, and many did not come back. Fewer young professionals have been entering industrial trades at the rate the industry needs. When peak demand hit, companies scaled headcount as fast as they could without a fully rebuilt talent pipeline to draw from.
The people are there. The years are not.
What it is going to take
Acknowledging the gap is the first step, and it is one the industry has been slow to take because the problem is harder to quantify than an open headcount. You can count vacancies. You cannot count the institutional knowledge that walked out the door with the last wave of retirees.
Structured mentorship, realistic assessments of what junior talent is ready for and giving experienced workers a reason to stay are all part of the answer. The labor shortage was the headline. The experience gap is the story underneath it, and it is the one that will define how well this industry executes over the next decade.
