I am lucky enough to work offshore and have done all of my working career. Years back Used to get asked by people who i Knew or who knew me through friends maybe 2-3 times in a year what was the best way to get a job offshore.
Nowadays it's the same question but every other day!Every man and their dog seems to want to come offshore for the money which is fair enough but I have also over the years seen the skills and knowledge of the average offsohre joe bloggs spiral downhill with some even "educated" guys being down right dangerous.Theres a lot of ex army guys out here and most that I have met are good guys and hard workers. From what I've seen and what I would recomend is that you look into NDT courses (non destructive testing) there are different levels of NDT tech dependant on years experiance and tickets held for eg DPI, UTI, MPI etc. I would say this coupled with a rope acces ticket would see you alright but the courses are not cheap and obviously work is not garunteed afterwards.
The drilling side is also popular but you'd be right in at the bottom end getting every s%*t job going. Saying that, career progression does tend to be easier and drilling itself is on the up at the moment prety much world wide.
Hope this helps.