I've been in similar situations.
Keep fighting the good fight.
I would like to stress that your employer should, and will likely be happy to pay (or give you the time) to do many of the following. Don't feel like you need to do all of these by any means, I just wanted to give you everything that came to mind that has helped me in my journey:
- Conferences both in your specific domain (in your case oil and gas), or your specialty, like a more general data science conference. Meet people there and keep in touch with them, both fellow attendees and also speakers and people who have booths there. Your employer should be cool with covering one or two of these a year. If they're reluctant or on the fence it has helped me in the past to writeup a little summary of the conference, what I hope to learn and how it apply to my work, and give them a written summary when you get back including concrete things that you learned that will help your company pragmatically.
- Meet mentors on platforms like this, foster and build those relationships. It seems like you are already doing this well. Other places to meet them are at local and virtual meetups for the software or packages you use, tools you use, industry societies, etc. Linkedin is also an underrated and underutilized tool for this IMO.
- Free or low cost remote courses. I'm just wrapping up a remote class at Stanford, it's been awesome. Many universities offer courses, or even course materials and videos you can get your hands on. Good universities, with good courses.
Do these things during the work day, because they are work. Don't think like you need to do all this stuff above and beyond. Any good company should be investing in you.
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