The Gulf is hiring again and offshore wind is rising. A note from the reception hall on where the offshore career is really heading in 2026.
A father sat across from me last week with his son, a mechanical diploma holder of twenty-three, and asked me the question I get asked more than any other. Is there still a future in this line, or is the oil work finishing?
It is a fair question, and I do not give a salesman's answer to it. I have been in offshore safety training long enough to have seen the down years, when the phones went quiet and good men sat at home. So I told him what I am actually seeing from where I sit, which is the reception hall of a training centre that the whole Gulf passes through.
What I am seeing is that the work is not finishing. If anything the Gulf has come back with some force this year. Aramco has been putting out a fresh round of offshore contracts, the first proper batch of that scale in a while, and the word from the men who come through here is that mobilisation is picking up. Over in the Emirates, ADNOC has kept its offshore projects moving, the gas expansions and the Nasr field work among them. When those projects move, they do not move with machines alone. Every platform, every vessel, every construction barge needs certified people on it, and those people cannot set foot offshore without valid survival training. That is the part of the chain we sit in.
I can see it in our own bookings. The recertification traffic has been steady all through the monsoon, which tells me the men already out there are staying out there and renewing. The first-timers are the ones that give me more hope, though. Young fellows with a trade qualification and no offshore experience yet, coming in for their BOSIET, betting on themselves. Most of them will fly out within the year.
But I told that father something else too, because it would be dishonest to talk only about oil and gas in 2026.
There is a second door opening now, and it is worth watching. India is building wind energy at a pace that is hard to fully picture. The country is on track to be one of the largest wind markets in the world for new capacity, and the industry itself is saying it will need workers by the hundreds of thousands over the next few years, in the tens of thousands here in India alone for operations and maintenance. Offshore wind is where this gets interesting for us. A technician climbing a turbine out at sea, or transferring from a boat to a foundation in open water, faces many of the same hazards a man on an oil platform faces. The training bodies for wind, the GWO standards, are built on the same logic we already teach every day. Sea survival, working at height, first aid, fire. Different industry, same discipline of staying alive in a hostile environment.
I am not going to stand here and tell you iMost is a wind-training centre, because our accreditation and our craft are in OPITO offshore standards and that is what we do to the highest level. What I am telling you, and what I told that young man, is that the foundation you build here does not lock you into one industry that might rise or fall. The habits of safety, the certifications, the discipline of the survival course, these travel. The energy world is changing shape, oil and gas on one side and renewables rising on the other, and the workers who will do well are the ones who are already trained, already certified, already trusted when the operators come looking.
So my answer to the father was yes. Yes, there is a future, and it is a wider one than there was ten years ago. But it belongs to the people who prepare for it properly and keep their certificates current, not to the ones who wait for the perfect moment that never comes.
The son booked his BOSIET before they left. I hope to see him fly out before the year turns, and I hope, whichever door he walks through, that the training he does with us is the thing that brings him home safe every single time.