In almost every industrial sector, there are fixed, standardised competency qualifications and benchmarks and clearly defined pathways to achieving them. These are essential to ensure the quality and safety of installations, and in most industries, they’ve become standard practice. Yet for much of the renewable energy industry, universal training and competency benchmarks either don’t exist or have very limited adoption, which limits their usefulness.
This isn’t to say that renewable energy firms don’t take competency seriously—far from it. Developers have a statutory obligation to ensure that their designers and installers meet competency standards, and this is taken extremely seriously. The problem is that ensuring that a workforce has the correct level of skill without a set of easily accessible benchmark qualifications can be expensive and time-consuming, and delivering these competencies can create a host of other issues.
Here, we look into the attempts made to build a UK-wide standard set of competency qualifications, and why this is such an important issue.
What are we doing about it so far?
Arguably, the closest that the renewable energy sector has come to overarching competency standards comes courtesy of the Global Wind Organization (GWO), an industry association representing the wind energy sector. Those wishing to work on wind turbines or in certain other aspects of the wind energy sector must have a qualification registered with the GWO, including mandated safety training, which must be updated at least every two years and registered on an online database.
It sets a great example for the renewables industry, and this model could – and arguably should – be expanded to other sectors of the industry, too. Earlier this year, representatives from the European solar sector spoke to our sister site, PV Tech, about the need to standardise training programmes and qualifications for the solar sector in particular.
Smaller sectors of the low-carbon industry have begun developing their own training standards, and while it remains to be seen how impactful this will be, it is undoubtedly a positive step in the right direction. Last year, Flexi-Orb launched the UK’s first certification scheme for electric vehicle (EV) chargepoint installers, with last year also marking the launch of the first training academy for heat pump installers, established by Aira.
The other major attempt to introduce overarching competency standards across the industry – the UK government’s launch of its long-promised ‘skills passport’ in January – focuses much more on transferrable skills and reskilling workers into the renewable energy industry,
The passport allows current workers in the oil and gas industry to use an online portal to assess how their skills and qualifications could enable them to move into the renewable energy sector. This is undoubtedly positive, and the emphasising of transferrable skills is a key step towards establishing national qualifications standards for the industry, boosting the profile of green careers and helping to deliver the ‘just transition’ away from fossil fuels that ensures economic opportunities for people at all levels of society.
However, the scheme does have some limitations. It only targets oil and gas workers, not those in other industries with transferrable who may wish to switch to green careers, such as those leaving the military. While workers in the fossil fuel industry are the main targets of the just transition effort, this does mean that a significant pool of talent with useful transferable skills may be left unaware of how they can make the career jump to green industries.
Furthermore, the career opportunities the passport aligns itself with so far almost exclusively focus on the offshore wind industry, to the exclusion of solar energy and other green technologies, which suffer their own specific skills challenges that need support to tackle. However, it is still early days for the scheme, so it is not unreasonable to hope these issues will be ironed out in the coming months.
Why the need?
Perhaps the most striking figure relating to green skills employment in the UK is the shocking numbers of young people who are unaware of the concept of ‘green skills’—according to a recent report by the Learning and Work Institute, 87% of young people aged between 16-24 are unaware of the idea of green skills.
There is a common saying in communities concerned with diversity—“you can’t be what you can’t see”. While this is most commonly used to emphasise the importance of public-facing examples of diverse talent in a particular industry, the same can be said for green skills in general, where jobs cannot be filled if people do not realise they exist.
This is not to say that ensuring diverse representation in the renewable energy industry isn’t an issue too. According to the January 2024 UK government report ‘Green Skills in Education and Employment’, in 2021/2022, only 6.9% of starters in construction apprenticeships were women, and as little as 8.2% of starters came from minority ethnic groups.
The same report noted that vocational educational training programmes such as apprenticeships – which young people from low-income backgrounds are more likely to consider over their wealthier peers – suffer from lower levels of visibility than the traditional academic pathways, as well as a lower considered level of prestige.
The answer to both of these problems lies both in developing new and clear pathways into industry and in successfully promoting these pathways to young people about to enter further or higher education. This is highlighted not only in the growing green skills gap, but also
All in all, the most obvious reason for the need to develop strong green skills qualification standards is the sheer effort needed to assess competency in a landscape with a variety of competency standards.
While exact statistics on the time and money spent on examining competency for new hires into renewable energy construction are limited, it is a common understanding that anything that slows the process of hiring is a significant expense of time and money, and thus the immediate business benefits of a clearly defined standard qualification are easy to see.
