Skilled Workers Needed | Video

Alex Hagan | 10/1/2012

In North Dakota, there are plenty of jobs and plenty of people applying for them. For MBI Energy Services, the applications keep growing.

"We actually get about six to 700 applications per month for CDL positions, probably another four hundred for non CDL positions," said MBI President of Administration Chuck Steffan.

With plenty of newcomers looking for oil field jobs, Steffan says more training is needed for potential employees.

"Certainly there a lot of people coming to this area and have never had oil field experience before."

Many of the opportunities people look for are skilled jobs. However, there are a lot of potential employees without the right experience.

"A lot of people don`t give a real honest assessment of the true skills that they have. They might come here thinking they`re going to be a truck driver, a CDL driver, and they have no absolutely no skills or background in CDL," said Phil Davis of Job Service North Dakota.

Even for city jobs in Dickinson, skilled workers are hard to come by.

"A lot of people that are applying for positions, they may not have a lot of experience in that position but they are trying," said Dickinson City Administrator Shawn Kessel.

Job Service North Dakota employees say job seekers need to figure out what their strengths really are.

"We sit down with them and do that skill assessment with them. If we find out that they don`t meet the needs of that job opening, we try to steer them to something where they meet those needs," said Davis.

Both the city of Dickinson and MBI Energy Services understand more training is needed to fill positions.

"Certainly we don`t turn anybody out in a job until we feel comfortable in their ability," said Steffan.

"We may have to do more training than we`re used to, and so we`ve incorporated that into our hiring plan," said Kessel.

That might be what more employers around the state will have to start doing.

Job Service North Dakota has developed a program called SkillBuild ND, which is designed to meet employers` needs for skilled workers.

COMMENT ON THIS STORY

BACK TO NEWS | BACK TO DICKINSON STORIES