that's a general comment on heavy engineering disciplines. The miners' strike, various trends in the world markets and the oil price crash of the mid-80s resulted in massive, completely unstructured shedding of personnel and the substantial destruction of training structures.
The result was that a generation of school leavers, graduates and junior staff embarked on other careers and took no part in the subsequent revival. A lot of the older veterans have all sorts of odd-shaped holes in their CVs.
The same comments apply to the oil industry, where it is referred to as "the big crew change". It isn't helped by the "corporate" attitudes which have become entrenched in the interim, especially the plague of HR people :guns: and recruiters who don't understand the industry and operate by key word matching and "company man" prejudices.
There is intensive advertising in all heavy engineering sectors but I'm afraid, a lot less jobs. I'm working for BP at present, there have been ten or twelve roles advertised on this project alone but not a single new start, all internally filled. Much of the advertising is a matter of seeking candidates with completely unrealistic combinations of expertise, much of which simply isn't available at all.
Some of it consists of attempts to generate rate-cutting fights, or to get people to take on quite unrealistic levels of risk in terms of out-of-pocket costs. The wind farm sector suffers from this, in particular.
Another common variant is the "candidate visa" category. Agents who plainly don't have a clue, regularly contact me for roles in places like Angola or Kazakhstan where it is effectively impossible to procure visas, for political reasons. As a rule if thumb, if your potential employer can't get you a visa there is little point in you trying to. I simply nod, smile and forget about them.
There is a sub-set of these involving local taxation; I would require an uplift of at least 20% to work in Scandinavia for that reason alone, but there are always people offering work if you are prepared to pay local taxation of up to 55% of gross, or don't understand the rules.
I would only work for BP in Azerbaijan, because of the tax issues. BP pay my local tax and generally speaking, their contractors and subcontractors don't. This makes a significant difference to the actual value of the contract, but there is always someone in an agency ( often with a background in financial recruitment, these days ) ::) who clearly doesn't understand this, cluttering up my inbox...
''the stopes soared beyond the range of our caplamps' - David Bick...... How times change .... oh, I don't know, I've still got a lamp like that.