The world’s appetite for energy is growing. In 2024, global energy demand rose by 2.2 per cent year on year, according to the International Energy Agency, up from an average of 1.3 per cent in the decade to 2023. All sources of energy increased to meet the need. The electricity sector led the pack, rising by over 4 per cent, spurred by increased use of air conditioners, more electricity-intensive manufacturing, expanding data centre rollout and AI usage.
This expansion across the sector has hoovered up workers. The IEA’s World Energy Employment 2025 report says that for the third year in a row, global energy employment grew by 2.2 per cent, neatly matching the demand for energy itself and outpacing job gains in the wider economy. Since 2019, the sector has added 5.4mn jobs worldwide; since 2022 it has created one in five new roles in China and one in 10 in the US.
Despite this relative hiring success, the sector is still facing a talent shortage. While the dearth has different origins in each subsector — the resurrection of nuclear power and the shift from fossil fuel to renewable generation for instance — there has been a common outcome: a scramble to hire for specific skills that cannot be fully met by the current workforce.
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James Allen, chief executive of Airswift, a science, technology, engineering and mathematics-focused workforce solutions provider which produces the annual Global Energy Talent Index, says: “Shortages of engineering talent have been a problem for multiple years — that’s not going away. There is a shortage of people entering the STEM professions: there aren’t enough young graduates being encouraged to do engineering out of school.” The problem is compounded by energy projects expanding across the board, he says. “Electric vehicles, battery plants, hydrogen plants — all of these energy segments and markets are competing for the same talent.”
The demand shows little sign of abating. With tech leaders planning a massive expansion of data centres and space cooling usage rising with warming temperatures, the appetite for energy looks set to grow. And with it the sector’s workforce challenges seem likely to become more acute.
“We need 80,000 electricians each year for each of the next 10 years. We need 376,000 people in nuclear. There’s a projected shortfall of 300,000 welders,” says Missy Henriksen, executive director of the Center for Energy Workforce Development, a US-based non-profit organisation focused on developing a highly skilled energy workforce. Addressing this shortage requires defining what skills are needed and establishing pathways into those roles.
Growth spurts
While the energy sector has seen growth in employment across the board, some areas have been hiring more than others. The trend has been particularly pronounced in electricity, which became the largest global energy sector employer for the first time in 2024, according to the IEA, responsible for three-quarters of all energy job additions over the prior five years.
Overall demand for electricity has been growing, but the shift to renewables for power generation has also added complexity. Fossil fuels, while a less efficient source of energy, can provide stable electricity generation on a scale that requires dozens of solar farms to substitute. A single solar or wind farm tends to produce less electricity than traditional fossil fuel-powered generation facilities, requiring more installations — and more dispersed workers — for the same output. These must all be connected to the grid, requiring workers for installation and, thereafter, more scattered teams for maintenance.
Scottish Power, one of the UK’s largest electricity network owners, says that with the move away from fossil fuels its transmission division will need to more than double its workforce of 1,200 employees over the next few years to satisfy its investment plans.
The company’s projected requirements are just a fraction of the nearly 132,000 new jobs that need to be created by the UK’s power sector between 2024 and 2030, according to estimates from Energy & Utility Skills. The UK energy and utility industry body believes that a further 45,000 new workers must be found simply to replace retirees.
US renewables generation is also growing, notwithstanding the current administration’s preference for fossil fuels. Data published by the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission shows that of the 32GW of newly available installed generating capacity from December 2024 to October 2025, nearly 90 per cent came from renewable sources. This was primarily from solar, whose installed capacity had grown 20 per cent since the end of 2024.
According to a survey from the US Department of Energy, in 2024 electric power generation in the US employed 933,800 workers, of which 370,600 were in the solar sector. Solar subsector employers were anticipating a need to add 10 per cent to their workforce in 2025. More than a third of employers across the generation sector said that hiring workers was “very difficult” with reasons ranging from insufficient education to lack of experience, training or technical skills.
A shortage of trained staff is a significant challenge for the nuclear sector. In the US in 2024, nuclear generation employed just shy of 58,000 workers. While the expectation was for 2025 hiring demand of just 2 per cent, respondents to the same US energy department survey were already finding it harder to source talent than the solar sector.
The department estimated the US would need an additional 375,000 workers to support former president Joe Biden’s goal of tripling nuclear capacity by 2050. This number includes 100,000 staff to operate new reactors and 275,000 to build nuclear infrastructure. Since then, the Trump administration has expanded the goal to quadrupling capacity by the same date.
But the nuclear industry has struggled to attract talent in the aftermath of disasters such as Fukushima, disincentivising new entrants into the workforce. Just under a quarter of workers are aged between 18-29, with 18 per cent over 54, compared with 29 per cent and 17 per cent respectively across electric power generation as a whole.
As a clean and stable source of energy, however, nuclear generation has been resurrected, especially with increased demand for power from data centres. The lack of young talent has led companies to look to retirees for the experience and skills to work on reopening mothballed facilities in the US, such as Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Palisades in Michigan, and to develop the emerging small nuclear reactor sector.
Despite the energy transition gaining traction in many developed markets, employment in the fossil fuels industry has grown. The IEA says that developing countries such as China, India and Indonesia are driving demand for workers in upstream oil and gas, primarily liquefied natural gas and coal. Coal employment has grown by 8 per cent worldwide since 2019, even as hiring in developed economies in the sector has fallen by 20 per cent. India had the strongest jobs growth in the energy sector out of all countries (5.8 per cent).
Finding and keeping workers
The worker shortfall is not unique to the energy sector, making the issue harder to resolve. A 2024 survey from ManpowerGroup, the human resources consultancy, found that nearly three-quarters of companies worldwide across most sectors, including energy, were struggling to acquire the talent they needed.
Ageing Workforce
A significant factor behind the shortage is the ageing workforce, a demographic challenge which will only get worse. The OECD’s Employment Outlook 2025 projects that by 2060 the working age population (those aged between 20 and 64) will have declined by 8 per cent across its whole area. For more than a quarter of OECD countries, the decline will be as much as 30 per cent. Early retirements during Covid exacerbated the natural demographic trend, although inflation and workplace demand has drawn some to return to employment.
The CEWD says that the issue of ageing workers is particularly pronounced in energy, a sector that fewer young people have been attracted to join. “There are a variety of misperceptions and misunderstandings about energy careers. Largely, people don’t appreciate the breadth of career opportunity you can have within energy … We can offer so many different fulfilments in terms of what motivates people professionally,” says Henriksen. This can range from working for the community to helping with environmental stewardship while working at a desk or outdoors and earning a decent living.
The Global Energy Talent Index 2026 report which surveyed 9,000 energy professionals worldwide over 10 weeks up to the end of October 2025 found that all sectors experienced a drop in the percentage of under 35-year-olds in their employ. In the power and nuclear “transitional” sectors, only a third of the workforce is under 35, while that proportion dropped to 35 per cent in renewables. In the traditional fossil fuels sector, over 45s account for nearly half of the workforce.
The survey also found that 81 per cent of traditional sector employees, those that work in the fossil fuels complex, had been approached for new roles in the past year. With salary expectations strong across the board, the biggest risk for retention is workers’ perceived lack of a career plan. About half of respondents say they have no formulated plan in place and many would welcome more training and education opportunities than their employers provide. “Anecdotally, if people aren’t getting what they want within two to four years they are leaving — it’s a generational difference,” says Allen at Airswift.
Immigration Policies
More restrictive immigration policies have added to the shortage. Occupations from infrastructure construction through extraction to more technical roles have a high proportion of immigrant workers. A 2025 UK parliamentary paper on immigration in the context of the country’s green transition noted that, while domestic entrants into apprenticeships in related occupations had risen, labour migration would still be needed to play a “supplementary” role. It added: “In the context of labour immigration reforms introduced by the May 2025 Immigration White Paper, however, international recruitment may become more challenging.” The skilled worker visas historically used to recruit the relevant talent were already inadequate and are likely to become even harder to access, increasing requirements for domestic training.
In the US, energy sector data specifying immigrant participation is scarce, but a 2024 report from Texas said that one-fifth of the state’s energy sector was of immigrant origins, roughly in line with the proportion of immigrants employed in all sectors across the US. As a proxy for the broader national energy sector, immigrants made up 35 per cent of the nation’s construction and extraction industry workforce in 2024.
With the construction sector a credible proxy for trends in the energy industry, there are signs that the Trump administration’s policies to reduce illegal immigration have had an impact. A survey of almost 1,400 companies by the Associated General Contractors of America undertaken in August found that just over a quarter said they were affected by immigration actions. One in 10 said they had lost workers due to actual or rumoured raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some 5 per cent of respondent companies said ICE agents had visited jobsites. Overall, 92 per cent of contractors said they were finding it difficult to fill vacant positions.
Solutions
While some subsectors require specific expertise, such as the nuclear sector, the methods to address the shortfall in talent are fairly universal. Providing clearer pathways to energy-related careers, better information and education on the opportunities in the sector as well as changing its image or perception among potential candidates all could increase the pool.
Encouraging more young entrants is essential given the poor demographic outlook. Young people don’t necessarily know how to take the first step into an energy career and educators are not sufficiently knowledgeable about the sector. Better information about the opportunities would help, as CEWD’s Henriksen points out, targeted not just at young people themselves but also at those who influence them such as teachers, guidance councillors and parents.
The educational framework has been something of an impediment, with focused practical training for energy careers lacking for decades. For example, the inclusion in 2024 of energy as a standalone field within the US’s Career Cluster framework — the system used to organise career-focused education in the country — heralded the opening of a new route to dedicated energy workforce training for 10mn Career and Technical Education students. To make it easy for implementation, the CEWD offers free curricula and in partnership with Accenture has created resources to offer to schools which they will soon augment with skills-based training.
“We think all of these things are essential game-changers as we work to fill the jobs that will be needed on the long-term basis. It’s systemic change — we can’t just solve the human capital needs with a PR campaign. We have to look at implementation of systemic changes, advancements to really create our bench and not just capture our bench,” says Henriksen.
More degrees and apprenticeships for roles where there is a shortage, which range from nuclear scientists to lineworkers, technical electricians and engineers, would also help. This is happening in some areas — for instance in the EU — but it is still insufficient.
Attracting more women could also go a long way towards augmenting the ranks of the energy workforce. The Energy Workforce & Technology Council, a trade association for oilfield services and technology, said in 2024 that there was room to improve a 12 per cent intake of women into the field given that 29 per cent of entry level recruits in STEM fields are women. The CEWD notes that women make up 47 per cent of the nation’s workforce in the US and Henriksen says women account for only about a quarter of workers in the energy sector. The figure for trades is “somewhere in the single digits”.
The CEWD is working to close this gap in the skilled trades — frontline energy provision roles in the field — by connecting women considering an energy industry career with those already on the inside. An initiative, called High PowHer, holds national “PowHer Hours” webinars every two weeks for women to share their experiences with outsiders who may be interested in similar roles. This is being expanded with the PowHerful Women programme, a mentoring programme which offers more one on one insights and guidance.
Other initiatives introduced by individual companies include all-female crews that work job sites together and can share accommodations. Some now provide PPE and fire-retardant clothing made for female rather than male bodies, hard hats that can fit ponytails or power tools designed for women to use. Nursing accommodations for women with small children and bathrooms better suited to women when out on a job are also “some of the basic fundamental and foundational things we are seeing much more attentiveness toward”, says Henriksen.
Reducing the need for more workers is another way to deal with the worker shortage, for instance using technology to squeeze more out of the assets already built. Sensors trained to recognise changes in acoustic signals can be as effective at identifying problems as engineers with decades of experience. Mark Dobler, chief executive of NAES, the American power generation industry’s largest independent services provider, says that monitoring devices enabled with thermostatic imaging such as those built by robotics company Gecko can spot insulation leakages even before human operators, reducing outages or the risk of catastrophic failure, all of which goes towards improving efficiency and output.
Deployed across multiple facilities, such solutions can extract more from existing facilities, reducing the need for greenfield plants and the workers required to service them and resolving hiring problems before they occur, he says.
Technology
Technology can help to augment training as well as to enhance the efficiency of the existing workforce. AVEVA, the industrial technology company, uses a digital twin to present realistic, immersive training experiences, a far more effective way of educating employees in how to assess plants and solve common problems than simply providing a manual. A digital twin can bring workers up to speed on facilities that are under construction, preparing them to commence activity in a plant as soon as it is operational.
The “gamification” of training can appeal to young entrants as well as being a means to capture the experience of veteran workers with years of practical experience at a specific facility. “The experienced workforce knows exactly what to do in specific timeframes, sometimes also shortcutting or going through some procedure that is not documented in a way that is easy for a new employee to understand exactly what must be done,” says Maurizio Galardo, Fellow, Chief Technologist Organisation, AVEVA.
Enlisting veteran workers’ input for training plant models is especially valuable for older plants which may have been upgraded or refitted to the extent that they no longer match their original format. “We represent the digital twin of each specific plant, so that you can recognise your environment, the space between assets,” Galardo says, which is a huge advantage over training on a generic plant when it comes to responding to urgent situations which may require and engineer to “check a dial and press a button” in a specific space.
A digital twin is also particularly useful in training for disaster scenarios that may not occur regularly, facilitating extensive readiness training in an unscripted, realistic environment. “If I represent exactly your plant, you can mimic exactly what you have to do in your plant, also in terms of time needed for moving from A to B to perform what is needed,” he says. In the event of a total power outage at a nuclear facility, for instance, standard lighting may be unavailable. The AVEVA training system can replicate a virtual torch effect within the simulation, allowing operators to practice orientating themselves, assessing spatial conditions and identifying a safe route to carry out emergency shutdown procedures. Scenarios can be used to train control room operators as well as field operators, with the added benefit that communication between the two can also be rehearsed.
These systems can train and test individuals for continuing competency as well as evaluate them on their performance under stress, allowing companies to determine which operator might be best suited to carrying out high-pressure tasks. Group activities can be conducted remotely with dispersed participants — particularly valuable when training for operations on facilities that have restrictions on the number of people who can be present, such as oil rigs.
Staff restrictions on oil rigs can also make AI a valuable tool in monitoring and operations, analysing data and identifying red flags so that inspection staff need not necessarily be sent to the site, only the people required to fix the problem.
Facility maintenance can benefit from technology more broadly, Galardo says. Engineers who have a specific and irregular task scheduled can rehearse ahead of time and ensure that they have the right materials and tools to hand. Crews that operate in multiple plants across remote locations which they visit infrequently can use the digital twin for guidance as “a sort of TomTom” to optimise routes between plants as well as to find the exact location of the asset that needs attention, saving considerable time.
Dobler at NAES sees similar challenges that technology can help solve. In the next decade, 25 to 30 per cent of NAES’s workforce will reach retirement age. The key, he says, is to capture and digitalise their knowledge so that a “five-year worker” can be augmented with analytical tools that carry the experience of one who has known a plant for 30 years.
Airswift’s Allen is optimistic about AI’s potential to enhance the workforce, not only with helping to fill gaps but also expanding the capabilities of engineers to become more generalist. “We haven’t got enough people in the industry for all these projects that we’ve got going on in the world.” He sees AI moving engineers from “focused disciplines to project engineering or general engineering roles supported by some of these AI tools to allow us to expand the bandwidth to get all these projects and initiatives under way”.
Equipment such as that produced by Gecko could also help the energy sector in areas with severe worker shortages, such as in welding, which is critical to the industry both in equipment and facility construction. The company’s autonomous tools have shown 90 per cent improvement in speed and 99 per cent improvements in quality for defence equipment. Using these robots, less experienced workers can perform to the same level as veteran welders, reducing the pressure on companies to hire experienced people.
Tap other pools
Involvement in community-based programmes, which aim to match labour and skills in regions where energy workers are in demand, is an established route for some US-based employers.
Armed forces veterans are another source of talent whose skillset can map well with the needs of energy roles. In the US, the energy sector employs twice as many ex-servicemen and women as the broader economy. UK energy employers such as Scottish Power along with initiatives such as Mission Renewable are also looking to the veteran community to augment the workforce.
Despite a tightening immigration backdrop, hiring overseas workers remains an avenue for certain roles. Some governments have established visa schemes that offer pathways for multinational companies to transfer specialist workers into developed countries. The UK has the Senior or Specialist Worker visa programme while the US has the H-1B visa, which covers specialty occupations. However, the terms and conditions around some of these immigration schemes have become more restrictive in recent years.
Where immigration may be a limited option, remote working allows for the recruitment of more overseas workers, for instance in India, to carry out technical roles such as directing workers on-site on a rig. As data centres proliferate in increasingly remote locations, finding a workforce willing to relocate is also likely to be a challenge. Remote monitoring could be a solution here, too.
Conclusion
With the demand for energy growing rapidly and the complexity of the sector increasing, the demand for workers will not abate. Companies that can tap into all the solutions available, from encouraging new entrants into the talent pool to adopting technology, will have the best chance of capitalising on the sector’s strong growth outlook.
