One of the most crucial and often misunderstood elements of the green skills gap is education: how do we train the next generation of renewable energy workers to support and make sure that the industry and the further education sector are on the same page?
We spoke to Mark Wakeford, someone with a unique insight into the issue from both sides. A self-proclaimed wearer of many hats, he is both chair of solar energy firm EvoEnergy, and has served as a governor for a Northamptonshire-based construction college for the past decade.
Definitions matter
Arguably, everyone – from young people entering the workforce, to employers, to the renewable energy industry itself – has a different definition of what ‘green skills’ are, and that, Wakeford notes, is an enormous problem.
While in the further education sector, the term “green skills” is generally defined as someone who has a hands-on role in creating or installing a renewable energy asset, in the wider working world, the definition is much more nebulous and vague, extending to marketing or procurement for a company supplying clean energy. While neither of these definitions is wrong, Wakeford notes that the lack of definition makes it difficult – or nigh on impossible – to calculate the number of people needed to fill the gap.
Industry body Solar Energy UK estimates that around 60,000 people will be needed to meet the demand for solar panel installations alone by 2030, and the falling cost of solar energy and rising demand for it is only set to increase this figure further. However, it is hard to define how well this need is being met when other studies, such as last year’s LinkedIn Global Green Skills Report, use more fluid definitions of what constitutes a “green skill”.
Notably, that report stated that global demand for green talent increased by 11.6% from 2023 to 2024, but the supply of job candidates with at least one ‘green skill’ – another barely defined term – grew by only 5.6%. Wakeford himself takes issue with the way in which some statistics regarding green jobs and hiring are gathered. He notes that many studies use online job boards as a source of data on demand for candidates with green skills, which may not fully encapsulate the scale of demand or hiring of such candidates, as many smaller green technology firms are less likely to use online job boards as a recruitment tool.
Wants and needs are different things
Additionally, Wakeford says that the industry is not thinking far enough into the future when it considers the talent it is trying to recruit, instead pushing qualifications that solve immediate issues. While this is an easy trap to fall into, and there are undoubtedly problems in the energy industry today that urgently need solving, Wakeford argues that training students to solve the problems of today’s industry is not equipping them for a potential 40-year career in the renewable energy industry.
Wakeford is a major advocate for continuing education and bitesize learning. He notes: “What we desperately need is soft skills” adding that in the future, the green workforce “is going to be training continually, and we’re going to have a whole load of micro qualifications”.
He believes that this should be a key focus of both the energy industry and qualifying bodies, arguing that enabling workers to evolve their skill sets and knowledge as they progress through their careers is vital, but concerningly, “that infrastructure simply isn’t there yet”. This is something that today’s workforce is already crying out for: a report commissioned last year by utility OVO Energy found that fewer than one in ten people receive any dedicated green skills training at work, despite one in five asking their employer for such training.
He also notes that the training and further education sector is currently unable to keep up with the changing needs of industry, adding: “The training profession isn’t keeping up with the requirements of the modern world and what is happening on the ground.”
Wakeford notes that recent cultural changes in education and industry are beginning to have a positive impact on addressing this issue, but that the pace of change needs to be faster: “There are all sorts of things which workers are going to need to be aware of moving into the world of work today, which, until a few years ago, we simply weren’t taking any notice of. Now things are things are improving.”
An additional problem is that developing new training programmes and apprenticeships takes time – often years, followed by at least a two-year delay before the first candidates graduate from such programmes. Wakeford notes that this has forced training providers to be extremely creative and agile, adapting currently existing apprenticeships to attempt to fill skills gaps rather than develop new programmes from the ground up.
One thing that ensures that further education institutions can maintain an active understanding of the current nature of the construction and renewable energy industries is communication, something which is increasingly promoted as an essential part of green skills training provision. Wakeford points out that further education colleges are now measured on how well they communicate with employers as part of their Ofsted inspection, incentivising strong links between industry and education.
Wakeford notes that in the college where he serves as governor, they encourage employers to host lectures for a day or two a year or have lecturers do a few outings per year to see what’s happening on the front line of whatever subject area they’re teaching—“that gives them the opportunity to understand firsthand what’s going on and what the key issues are around that subject.”
Awareness remains an issue
Wakeford mentions the success of the Sector-Based Work Academy programme whereby employers in the renewable energy sector can reach out to local further education institutions and the Job Centre, which manages work opportunities for unemployed people claiming benefits in the UK, so suitable candidates for those jobs are put into training programmes at local further education colleges. They are allowed to continue receiving benefits while they train. At the end of their training period, candidates are offered job interviews with the companies that began the process; Wakeford says the employment rate from this system is around four times higher than the average leaving college. The success of this programme has not gone unrecognised: it was used as an exemplar by the United Nations at its conference in New York last year.
Wakeford notes that despite the UK’s world-leading status in this arena, industry and employers remain unaware of all the opportunities to boost green skills and recruit talent. He states: “The UK is leading the pack in terms of demonstrating how it’s been done, and so trying to make employers aware of those opportunities within the UK is something which we need to do, and we need to shout very loudly about it.”
