With the current recession, it is hard to imagine how safe any one's jobs can be. There have been several cases of redundancies in the United Kingdom, United States of America, France, Germany, China, India, Dubai and several developed and developing countries in Africa, Asia, Middle East and South America.

Within the oil & gas sector, most companies have been able to cope with the current times by reducing development of major capital intensive projects. It is possible there have been a few cases of lay offs of staff by some oil companies.

But the major news about Shell restructuring and reducing their workforce by thousands of employees came as a surprise but also a welcomed strategy by the new CEO. Shell's headquarters for its global downstream operations ? which covers non-exploration activities ? will remain in London in the UK.

They will eventually include trading and alternative energy such as biofuels so it is unlikely that many jobs in London will go, but no one knows at this stage what exactly will happen in the future. Job cuts could be heaviest at Shell's global head office in The Hague in the Netherlands, where a lot of people have worked over long period of times for Shell and have demonstrated a reasonable level of integrity based on the supposedly job security that Shell offered.

The new CEO of Shell, Mr. Voser said that the new structure will increase accountability in the company, and improve Shell's performance on delivering new projects and developing new technologies. These changes will increase our focus, accelerate our plans to reduce complexity, corporate overheads and costs, and result in faster decision-making and delivery.

With this restructure, thousands will be unemployed. The management addresses the event as restructuring, but do they understand the impact of families of the laid off workers. There financial commitments, education of their children and the projects that they have embarked on. Companies have to realize the gravity of the impact, what were their strategies when they were expanding and hiring more workers. The current situation again is a blow to the economic condition.

With this loss of jobs, many Shell employees are unsure of what the future holds for them and might decide to start looking for oil jobs soon.

Other major oil companies like Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Total, Statoil, BP and ConocoPhillips will likely be searching for suitable Shell employees that they can absorb. However, job seekers who find themselves in a situation where jobs cut are planned should start posting their CVs on suitable oil jobsites, so that recruiters and employers can find them quickly and contact them for relevant jobs.

It is very imperative to be proactive about searching for oil jobs as with the recession their will likely be more people searching for these jobs at the same time as you, and its advisable to have a right frame of mind and be willing to consider other related positions, even if what one exactly wants doesn't come by very quickly.

Hence, for all those finding themselves in this very hard times and wondering what to do ? the best thing is to put yourself together and start making yourself ready and available for oil jobs available out there. The earlier you start, it's always the better.