Everywhere you go you will hear people recommending that you get hired for oil rig jobs in offshore work starting as a roustabout. What is a roustabout and how can you get a job like this without any kind of prior offshore experience at all?

The reality is that you can start offshore without previous offshore experience – everyone else did at one point. However, you do need to have some previous work experience of some kind that is relevant to the position. Such experience will qualify you as an offshore rig roustabout, but you need to be able to highlight that experience to get this very lucrative, although difficult job.

A roustabout is an entry level job on an offshore rig–or a land based rig, that will see you making some fairly good money for a job that equates to a general laborer. On an land based rig, the qualifications are really not so stringent.

The reality is for offshore oil work there are a few different criteria for taking a roustabout job. Factually there are a lot of people out there with less experience than you have. The edge they may get is that they know how to write a great resume and a good cover letter to make themselves look good.

While you may have all the experience in the world to put you where you need to be so far as qualifying for those jobs, it’s how you sell yourself that will count in the end. Get a great oil job resume together for your offshore job hunting before you begin applying for those positions. Keep your resume updated and target your cover letter and the resume that goes with it to the specific job that you’re going to want.

The fact is that you can be a crack chef of baker but if you’re someone who has three years of cooking and no experience with feeding a crowd then you may not get the job. In one instance, a young man had three years of cooking class and had worked summers on a land based rig. Because he was trying to get a cooking position in the offshore jobs, he didn’t consider the oil rig job that he had taken years before as relevant experience, but when he told them what he had done, his job was secured.

Make sure that any experience that you have in oil, as well as what you are applying for is in your resume. Getting good advice about what the offshore jobs recruiters are looking for in a resume is an important part of your application process. You can be the best roustabout, the best offshore worker that has been applying in months, but unless you let them know why, no one will see the qualities and experience that you bring to the job.

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