There is no shortage of people interested in working in the kinds of fields that will be crucial to deliver the UK’s energy transition, but industry must do more to bring young people into the sector to ensure the country can fill its green skills gap.
This was a conclusion drawn by speakers on a panel on the second day of Solar Media’s Clean Power 2030 Summits, focusing on hiring and employment in the UK renewable energy sector. However, according to Chris Claydon, CEO at JTL, even thinking about skills and jobs in this way rather misses the point.
“‘What’s a green job?’ is a really poor question,” Claydon said. “Are you a green employee if you’re welding a green hydrogen project one day and an offshore oil rig the next?”
“But the skills are immutable,” he continued, highlighting how many of the skills that underpin the jobs required to facilitate the UK’s clean energy transition are simply construction and electrical jobs that already exist, but are in need of better guidance to the renewable energy sector.
“As an employer there isn’t a great deal of incentive,” said Tracey Elliott, director at Eden Sustainable, a commercial solar installer with fewer than 50 employees. “The Solar Roadmap says ‘installers, installers, installers,’ but actually they’re little companies that are employing a handful of people and they’re doing a lot of our installation. They’re who we’re relying on to be our training providers, and we’re not helping them.
“For us, if we ‘ve had an apprentice, it’s really quite hard work, and you need to have a philanthropic sort of attitude to take on an apprentice,” Elliott continued, suggesting that the model of building skills through apprenticeship programmes with firms active in the industry is not appropriate for all of those companies.
Employers need confidence to take on apprentices
“From the electrical side, it’s not a problem attracting people to become electricians. On average, we have about 10,000 applicants every year and we take on about 2,000 starts every year to become apprentices, and that’s without any marketing of any description,” said Claydon, highlighting the strength of the apprenticeship programme in the UK.
This optimism echoes positive sentiments expressed earlier during the event about the UK’s renewable energy investment landscape, with many describing it as an “attractive” investment destination.
“It’s not a supply of learners that’s the challenge,” he continued, picking up on Elliott’s point about employers needing a “philanthropic attitude” to make this programme work. “The challenge is employers having confidence to take on apprentices – which is predominantly the best way to get the electrical skills – and is the only way you can achieve the assessments to be an electrician.”
The panelists agreed that, considering the scale of the UK green skills gap – according to Gemma Grimes, deputy chair of the skills group and the director of policy and delivery at the UK Solar Taskforce and Solar Energy UK, the UK will need to more than double the number of jobs in solar in the next five years – policy will have to play a role in this skills transition.
“Only 10% of the training in this country is funded by the government, the rest is employer-led, which I found quite alarming,” said Steve Thompson, group director of skills at the NOCN Group, suggesting that, considering that much of training is already accounted for by industry, it perhaps falls on industry to lead the way in training and apprenticeship schemes.
