Two Lines of Requirements: How to Land a bp Damage Prevention Job
Two Lines. That's the Entire Requirements List.
By John Crager, CMRP, SHRM-SCP | Next Shift Blog at WorkReady.works Published July 29, 2026 | ~1,650 words | 7 min read
Six-forty in the morning. A locate ticket drops.
Somewhere out in the territory a contractor has an excavator staged, a four-man crew standing around a tailgate, and a start time they fully intend to hit whether or not anybody shows up to mark the line.
Somebody shows up. Truck, electronic locator, probe, paint, flags. Forty minutes later there's yellow on the ground, a sketch on a tablet, and a short conversation with the foreman about what happens if that bucket wanders past the marks.
Excavation damage from third parties has sat near the top of the pipeline incident cause list for as long as PHMSA and the Common Ground Alliance have been counting. The person with the paint can is the control.
That work has a title. It has a pay grade, a training curriculum, and a ladder behind it. bp calls it Operations & Maintenance Damage Prevention. Five of them are open right now across five U.S. locations, and they're sitting on WorkReady™.
Here's the part most candidates will scroll right past.
The requirements section is two lines long
Not two paragraphs. Two lines. A high school diploma or equivalent, plus ROW and/or line locating experience.
That's the gate. All of it.
Everything else in that posting, and there's a lot of it, lives under a heading about multiskilling where bp writes in plain English that prior experience is helpful and preferred but not strictly required. Maps and alignment sheets. Underground construction. DOT equipment inspections. MAXIMO and Utilisphere. HAZWOPER and RCRA. Operator Qualification. A drone license.
Read that correctly. A company that stacks eleven systems into the "required" column is telling you it hasn't decided what the job is. A company that puts two lines in "required" and eleven systems in "we'll train you" is telling you something completely different. They know exactly what the job is. They've decided the person matters more than the resume.
We spend a lot of time in this blog picking apart HR-written postings that describe a career instead of a job. This one is the inverse. And almost nobody applies differently when they see it.
What the work actually is
Strip the bullets down. Four things happen in this role, and everything else supports them.
You locate and mark. Electronic locator and probe, on foot and out of the truck, ahead of anybody who intends to dig near the pipe. You watch the dig. Monitoring and observing excavation over or near the line, permitting the work, and recognizing what a third-party scope actually threatens before the third party figures it out. You inspect. Driving and walking line for leaks, damaged markers, encroachments, washouts, and the general category of things that look wrong. And you document, which is where the drones, the sub-meter GPS, the GIS attribute updates, the as-builts on foreign line crossings, and the inspection and repair reports come in.
Then the parts the recruiter is hoping you read carefully. Nights, weekends, holidays, and emergency 811 call-outs. Hand digging. Rough terrain. Windfalls and culverts and strain gauges. Seventy-five percent travel inside roughly a 250-mile radius of the office, which mostly means windshield time and not airports. You have to live within 50 miles of that office, and there's no relocation assistance.
Geography is the first filter, and it's a hard one. If you're not already inside the fence or willing to move on your own dime, the rest of this doesn't matter.
If you served, you've done most of this already
Troops-to-trades is the phrase on the graphic. Here's what it actually means in this specific job.
A 12N running horizontal construction has spent years thinking about what's under the grade before the blade moves. A 12B has been trained to treat a piece of ground as guilty until proven otherwise. Route clearance and EOD work builds a habit of methodical sweep discipline where missing one thing is the only failure mode that counts, which is the exact mental model of a locate. Land nav and route recon translate straight across to alignment sheets, sub-meter GPS, and knowing where you are on a right-of-way with no street signs. Seabees and Air Force civil engineers have the construction side cold. And 88M, motor transport, or anybody who lived out of a vehicle on independent tasking already understands DOT inspections, driving policy, and a day nobody supervises.
Then there's the part that doesn't map to a single MOS. You'll be the liaison with municipalities, utilities, excavators, and landowners who are irritated that you're on their property. Somebody has to hold a professional conversation with an angry contractor at hour nine and keep the pipe safe without escalating it. That's a skill. The military issues it in volume.
Civilian side, the door is just as open. Locating contractors like USIC. Municipal water and gas. Survey crews. Telecom construction. Utility line clearance and tree work. Excavation and site work. If you've held a locator, worked a One Call ticket, or built anything with a trench in it, you have the two lines.
What goes on the resume, and what to cut
Put the words right-of-way and line locating in the top third of page one, spelled exactly that way. Not "utility work." Not "field operations." The ATS is matching the posting language, and the posting language is right there in two lines. This is the rare case where mirroring the keywords is trivially easy, and people still miss it.
Quantify the territory. Miles of ROW covered, tickets worked per week, states you operated in, which One Call center, what facility types you marked, how many years without a hit. A locator who can say "roughly 40 tickets a week across three counties, no at-fault damages in four years" has just answered the only question the hiring manager cares about.
List every card in your wallet. OSHA 10 or 30, HAZWOPER, first aid and CPR, DOT medical card, TWIC, Part 107, any OQ covered tasks you already hold. Each one you already have is a training week bp doesn't have to fund.
Veterans, translate on the line under the job title. Write "12N Horizontal Construction Engineer (heavy equipment operations, site preparation, subsurface utility awareness)" instead of making a recruiter in Houston go look up an MOS code. Do the work for them.
And mention your driving record. Sounds strange until you count how many lines in that posting are about driving safely on and off the road. It's a condition of employment. Say it plainly and remove the doubt.
Five things the posting doesn't tell you, and exactly what to ask
Every posting has holes. Naming them is not being difficult. It's how you avoid signing up for something you didn't understand.
The pay is posted. The ladder isn't. The posting references a "job classification level" three times without ever saying which one this is or what sits above it. bp runs a multiskilling progression, which means the number you see is a starting rung, not the ceiling. Ask: "Which classification level is this requisition, what does progression to the next level require, and how long does it typically take?"
No callout economics. Nights, weekends, holidays, and emergency 811 response are all in there. What's missing is how often. Ask: "How many people are in the on-call rotation, is there standby pay, and what's the callout minimum?"
Travel is a percentage, not a picture. Seventy-five percent inside 250 miles could mean home every night or twelve overnights a month. Ask: "How many overnights per month is typical, is there a take-home vehicle, and how does per diem work on day trips?"
Operator Qualification is buried in the preferred column. It shouldn't be. OQ under the DOT covered-task rules is the real currency of pipeline work, and it follows you. Ask: "Which covered tasks will I be qualified on, who pays for the evaluations, and what's the timeline?"
"Be able to obtain" is doing heavy lifting. Part 107 for the drone, TWIC if local operations require it. Ask: "Does bp cover the Part 107 exam and the TWIC application, and what's the deadline after start date?"
Walk in with those five and you've separated yourself from every other applicant in the stack before the technical questions start.
Where it goes in five years
Nobody takes a damage prevention job because they love flags.
Watch what you accumulate. Operator Qualification on covered tasks. GIS and mapping fluency with real field data behind it. MAXIMO. Permitting. A working understanding of how integrity programs and ILI runs actually get supported in the dirt. Five years of that stacks into integrity technician work, GIS analyst roles, damage prevention supervisor, ROW agent, operations, and eventually into work management, scheduling, and project controls.
And here's the thing nobody tells the 24-year-old holding the locator. The planner whose job plans actually work is almost always the one who came up through the field. The scheduler who can call a bad duration is the one who's stood in the mud while somebody blew through it. This role builds that foundation and pays you while it does.
Your move this week
Five requisitions. Middletown, Ohio; Manhattan Station, Illinois; Evansville, Indiana; Freeman Station, Missouri; and Merrillville, Indiana. If your geography touches more than one, apply to more than one, because they're separate reqs with separate hiring managers.
Check the 50-mile residency rule before you spend an hour on the application. Put ROW and line locating on page one in those exact words. Translate your MOS. Bring the five questions.
And read the actual posting, all the way down. Not the summary, not somebody's repost. bp spells out the pay, the travel, the overtime expectation, and the training curriculum in the req itself. Everything in this article is meant to change how you read that page, not to replace it.
Postings close. The pattern doesn't. When a company puts two lines in "required" and a full training curriculum in "we'll teach you," that's an open door, and the people who read it as a wish list walk right past it.
Don't be one of them.
John Crager, CMRP, SHRM-SCP, is a heavy industry operations and planning professional with decades of experience in refinery and petrochemical environments. He is the author of Blue Collar Resume Mastery and Thank You for Your Service , available on Amazon, and writes about career navigation, credentials, and the future of the industrial workforce.
Follow the data. Trust the signal. Skip the noise.