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Grow your own renewables skills

6 July 2011

Training up existing and potential employees is the renewable energy industry's best long-term bet for tackling engineer shortages. Dominic Graham writes.

The huge expansion in renewable energy has resulted in an unprecedented demand for rare skills and skills combinations in workers. This is posing a significant problem for companies and recruiters, and the issue looks set to increase in severity as green commitments are ramped up. The government has signed up to the European Union Renewable Energy Directive, which includes a UK target of generating 15 per cent of energy from renewables by 2020. This is a sevenfold increase in UK renewable energy from 2008 levels. Achieving this could provide £100 billion-worth of investment opportunities and up to 500,000 jobs in the renewable energy sector by 2020. 
The expansion will demand a new workforce of highly skilled engineers, graduates and other industry professionals to design, build, install, operate and manage the projects that will result from the expansion. Thirteen per cent of respondents to a recent survey by the Engineering Council stated that they already had difficulty in sourcing senior level engineers and this is set to grow. 
To give an idea of the seriousness of the problem, there are currently 235,000 registered engineers in the UK, 37 per cent of which are over the age of 60. In real terms there are almost 90,000 currently employed engineers who will retire within five years. Within ten years the demand for engineers will push the number of jobs needed in the UK to 587,000. There are currently just 20,000 UK engineering graduates each year - clearly too few to match demand. 
There are three ways to overcome the skills gap, all of which come with their own challenges:
International recruitment. The skills gap is something that is being felt globally. The whole world is scrambling to develop renewable technology and infrastructure, with China leading the pack. A shortage of skilled candidates in the UK cannot be made up simply by tapping into a surplus elsewhere, at least not in the long term. 
India, which currently produces 150,000 engineering graduates each year and has a high proportion of English speakers, is a likely target for UK managers looking to recruit from overseas. However, India is also the world's fastest-growing democracy and there is a strong home-grown demand for engineering graduates, something also being seen in China and South America. Further barriers to cross-border recruitment from outside the EU include long lead times, higher relocation costs and language barriers. 
However, for all its hurdles, recruiting internationally does widen the pool of talent available, making it easier for a firm that has taken steps to make itself attractive to employees to steal a march on the competition and snap up the best people. 
Engineers are also among the most willing professions to relocate, with 87 per cent stating they would be willing to relocate for work in the latest Kelly Global Workforce Index (KGWI). As a short-term solution for individual companies, international recruitment has potential, but the industry must look elsewhere for a long-term fix.
Training, skilling-up and retention. As a long-term solution, training has the advantage of proving a far more cost-effective route than looking abroad for talent. The initial costs may seem dauntingly high, but keeping a pipeline of talent moving through the business reduces the need for costly external recruitment campaigns and helps ensure the future success of a company. However, companies should be mindful of the potential pitfalls of internal development. 
If your recently trained talent moves on to a competitor, it can make training an expensive tool, so companies must be careful to balance their training programmes with other initiatives aimed at improving retention. Fortunately for renewables companies, engineering is one of the professions that values training the most highly. Last year's KGWI found that 54 per cent of engineers saw training as the most important benefit outside of salary, suggesting that a good training programme could attract workers and retain them. 
One interesting trend that has emerged as a way of cutting the cost of training is to engage in joint ventures with other businesses. Companies often collaborate during the bidding process for large projects and those who also use each other's expertise to train staff or split training costs have benefited hugely. This needs to happen more. 
Something which we are increasingly seeing across the energy industry is a focus from companies on demonstrating their attractiveness to both new and existing staff. We are seeing companies investing in managerial and motivational training to boost job satisfaction and gain a reputation as a top employer. Internal HR professionals need to identify key motivators for their staff. For instance, sometimes smaller, more niche companies are actually better placed to retain staff for the very reason that they are likely to offer engineers exposure to groundbreaking work. 
Transferable skills. Transferable skills represent one of the best chances of filling the renewables gap in the short term until a new generation of engineers and scientists can pass through the school and university system. Often it may be impossible to find workers with exactly the right skills or combination of skills, mainly due to the newness of much of the technology involved in renewables. However, there is a lot of potential for crossover and adaption from similar fields. 
The UK is fairly fortunate in this regard because it is able to tap into a pool of skilled engineers from the offshore oil and gas industry to meet the growing needs of offshore wind. Other countries with pools of engineers who have worked offshore, such as Denmark, are also a good place to recruit from. Engineers who are used to working in these conditions with similar technology would be able to switch over into working in offshore renewables, a field which offers more long-term employability. 
However, one of the main curbs on engineers transferring over from oil and gas to renewables is salary: oil and gas pays significantly higher. One offshore engineer we worked with was recently offered a £75,000 salary to work for a renewables firm but ultimately chose to go with an oil and gas firm who offered him £100,000. Renewables companies are usually not prepared to get involved in a bidding war. Their attraction from an employee perspective is that they offer candidates the opportunity to work on larger, more innovative projects and are a longer-term option.
Dominic Graham is head of professional and technical, Kelly Services UK.
Source: Utility Week

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