The RESTRUCTURING OF THE OIL AND NATURAL GAS INDUSTRY AND THE COLLAPSE IN ENGINEER TRAINING IN THE STATE OF RIO DE JANEIRO AFTER THE 2014 CRISIS

Abstract

Since 2014, the oil and natural gas industry in Brazil has been undergoing a process of sectoral restructuring that has had profound consequences in territories impacted by the production structure of the production chain and by oil revenues arising from the exploration of these commodities, such as the This is mainly the case in the oil and natural gas producing region of the State of Rio de Janeiro (ERJ). At the same time, a political and socioeconomic crisis has been added to this restructuring process, at a national level, fundamentally derived from the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and Operation Lava Jato. Given this situation, this article aims to analyze the impacts of this crisis on the formal employment levels of engineers and the engineering training system in Brazil and, in particular, in ERJ, due to its strong economic dependence on exploration activities and production of oil and gas and its income. The research developed has an exploratory and descriptive nature, as it aims to identify and describe the factors that influenced the oil crisis and political and socioeconomic instability and its consequences in the restructuring process in the oil and gas industry. The article also seeks, in turn, to describe the impact of these transformations both on the stock of formal jobs for engineers and on the training of engineers in public and private higher education institutions. The analyzes point to severe impacts on the elimination of formal jobs and the decline in the number of enrollments in engineering. This scenario is characterized as a serious collapse in the training of engineers in Brazil and in ERJ, repeating the risk of a shortage of engineers observed in the job market during the period of economic dynamism, in the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s.