OIL and gas labour force experts have highlighted a shortage of people who have the specialist skills needed to help the UK make the most of the potential of the North Sea.

Demand for skilled staff is booming in oil and gas provinces around the world.

However, a report on labour market conditions suggests that UK firms could face particular problems getting enough staff to cope with the challenges associated with operating off the UK mainland.

In the latest edition of their Global Oil and Gas Workforce survey, Oilcareers.com and Air Energi note that the nature of exploring for oil and gas in the mature North Sea is putting a premium on staff with particular skills.

"Fabrication, technicians, operations and production personnel are among the highest in demand, but given the increasingly technical nature of offshore exploration here, professional sciences and engineering credentials are also highly valuable and proving difficult to find," the report says.

A spokeswoman for the authors of the report said the term "professional sciences" covered a broad range of subjects, including geoscience, physics, production chemistry, hydrology, biology and polymer science.

The findings will support claims by industry leaders that operating in the UK North Sea makes unusually exacting demands on firms.

Some firms hope to use new technology to develop relatively small fields in deep waters that might previously have been considered uneconomic.

The report said it has become an employees' market in the UK and Scandinavia and described both markets as being "booming or on the verge of".

It said that people with expertise in health and safety were also in big demand, as were drilling and design engineers and construction professionals.

Research by Hays and Oil and Gas Job Search, which was published last month, showed that the average worker in the North Sea oil and gas industry earned a salary of around £56,000 last year.

That is about twice the going rate applied to people in other businesses in the UK.