One of the hottest economic sectors in this decade will be the oil and gas exploration. Oil and gas drilling companies and the service companies that keep them going need reliable employees who are skilled in a number of fields. It is not all manual labor and roughneck work like the reality series "Black Gold". Modern oil rigs are a mix of hard labor, technology and electronics, geology and management.

On a typical rig you will find the mudloggers shack out near the mud pits. There the mudloggers live for the duration of the well and monitor gas and hydrocarbons that the drill bit encounters as well as collect samples of the rock cuttings from it. Mudloggers make between fifty thousand to one hundred thousand per year. A geology degree helps but some very small operations will consider training you.

Up on the rig floor the roughneck's screw the lengths of drill pipe together as each one is drilled into the earth. A member of the roughneck crew called the derrickman works up in the derrick racking back lengths of combined drill pipe or stands when they have to be pulled out of the hole or helps lower them in when they go back in the hole.

The driller has usually worked his way up the ladder from roughneck. The driller is the highest paid of the rig crew. The roughnecks themselves may have worked their way up from roustabout, the most common entry level, manual labor job on the rig.

When the oil company has drilled a section of earth that it wants to inspect for oil or gas bearing stratas it will call a wireline logging company such as Schlumberger to come and run a tool down the hole that measures gamma rays, resistivity, porosity, etc. Workers of outside companies such as these are referred to as service hands. Service hands move from rig to rig working for companies that provide myriad services from wireline logging to tractor work around the rig site.

The oil rig will have a mud engineer on duty that is responsible for making and monitoring the drilling fluid that is pumped downhole. This job requires a chemistry background and attending a 3 month "mud school" to be hired

The higher end service company jobs such as well logging engineer and mud logger offer high salaries and are not as manual labor oriented. There is however much travel and time away from home required and this can be hard on those new to the oilfield. In order to make the higher salaries you will most likely be working in a far flung part of the United States or offshore.

Getting an oilfield job involves determining what kind of job that your skills suit you for and preparing a resume and applying with the various companies in that field. Try http://www.rigzone.com and http://www.energyindustryphotos.com for descriptions of the kinds of jobs available and check the job postings in sites like http://www.texasoilfieldjob.com. A very good book that is used by service companies such as Halliburton to train employees is "A Nontechnical Guide to Petroleum Geology, Drilling, Exploration and Production". It is available from Amazon.com at the link below.