How should the energy sector tackle the skills crisis?

Back in September 2024, I wrote an article for Building Magazine regarding the challenges the construction sector faces as a result of the skill shortages in the UK. In this article, I would like to take a closer look at how this might affect the UK’s energy sector and whether current government policy can help.

The wider UK construction workforce has fallen to just over two million people, the lowest level of employees since the late 1990s. At the same time, the UK is committed to transitioning to renewable energy, and to meet the existing energy demands whilst adhering to the UK Government's net zero target. This will require about 15GW of new generation capacity to be deployed every year between now and 2035. The UK has never built more than about 7GW per year. To date, the most the UK has built in one year has been about 7GW. In addition to this, there are ambitions for critical infrastructure including housing, transport, and data centres, that all desperately need people in design and construction, who are currently in short supply.

The crux of the skills issue extends across a multitude of factors. From the industry’s ability to attract and retain talent, to the construction sector no longer being seen as an attractive career prospect amongst young people. In addition, the systemic failure to retain offshore skills from the oil and gas industry has meant the renewable energy sector is particularly overstretched. While it is not a new issue we are faced with, if the net zero transition is to be taken seriously, the skills crisis will become even more pervasive.

So, are the UK Government's policy targets achievable? There is no simple quick fix to the challenge, and we need to look (and work) beyond the attention-grabbing policy headlines.

We have already seen that the government will focus on the next generation of school leavers by establishing Skills England, a post-16 training framework to ‘transform opportunity and drive growth’. This is a sensible first step to a coordinated industrial strategy that includes the energy sector but is very much focused on a narrow cohort of people.

Previously, we have talked about the CIB (Clean Industry Bonus) that has been embedded in AR7. This will seek to ensure that developers of offshore wind projects make minimum levels of investment in social value and local supply chains to secure extra cash. This could potentially will unlock investment into skills and training, particularly in less affluent parts of the UK – but it will take several years to bear fruit and for its effectiveness to be measured.

Finally, there is the Get Britain Working white paper, a policy around remobilising some of the 9 million or so economically inactive people in the UK. We are yet to see what that looks like, but the sentiment is certainly in the right place.

So, there are some positive steps that have been taken, but none of them provide the quick results we need. As one senior manager working in the renewable energy sector in the North East of England said to me, "I have 150,000 hours to fill in 2025, and without skills mobility from overseas we might have to move our operations elsewhere."

So, will the policies still leave us short of the skills we need to deliver our net zero carbon energy ambitions? It certainly looks that way, but positive now is that the dial is shifting in the right direction, and it opens up the wider debate around skills mobility.