Green jobs: Help wanted

As the need to address climate change and the growing energy crisis become more a question of “how” than “if”, renewable energy and carbon markets are experiencing a surge in growth. But some experts fear there aren’t enough skilled workers to meet the demand.

Explosive growth in the “clean economy” is already happening. The American Solar Energy Society estimates that the US already has 8.5 million jobs in renewable energy and other energy-efficient industries. Meanwhile, specialist jobs in climate change and carbon markets, including analysts, managers and carbon traders, tripled between April 2006 and April 2007 and are expected to increase 50-fold by 2012, according to environmental recruiting company Acre Resources.

A shortage of human capital, however, presents a significant obstacle to further growth in the clean energy sector, a new study by New Energy Finance and recruitment firm Heidrick & Struggles suggests. The study, which examines top-level recruitment, reveals that business leaders in the sector believe finding executives to drive growth will be a key challenge for at least the next 12 to 18 months, with at least 95% describing the recruitment challenge as “serious”.

At the Advancing the New Energy Economy summit in January and the Carbon Forum America conference in February, corporate and government leaders also voiced concern about a shortage of qualified workers at a range of skill and wage levels. Meanwhile, the National Renewable Energy Lab in the US says insufficient skills and training are major barriers to the rapid adoption of renewable energy.

Reality on the street

Many companies share these concerns and say they are finding it difficult to fill open positions. In April, wind power provider PPM Energy in Portland, Oregon, had nearly 50 jobs ranging from executive level positions, such as finance and legal, to wind farm technicians and meteorologists available. The company, which has seen its workforce burgeon from just 12 in 2004 to nearly 600 today, says recruiting is its “biggest problem”.

Clean energy firms responding to the New Energy Finance study say three posts – chief technical officer, chief executive officer and senior project managers – are proving particularly difficult to fill, but that the shortage of qualified workers runs deep throughout the industry. The Oregon Institute of Technology, the first four-year undergraduate programme in renewable energy systems in the US, says it “constantly” gets phone calls from renewable energy companies with jobs to fill.

Dawn Dzurilla, president of Gaia Human Capital Consultants, an executive recruitment firm for the green sector, confirms that demand for qualified candidates outweighs supply. Right now, she says, some renewable energy firms have as many as 10-15 top-level job openings – a “sure sign that the search for talent is a difficult one to say the least”.

And the difficulties aren’t limited to the fledgling US markets. The need for additional worker training to meet the demands of the green economy is a global one, says Tom Baumann, co-founder and chief executive of ClimateCHECK, a greenhouse gas management services firm. “Internationally, there’s a growing need for people with business and managerial skills,” he reports.

Some companies are facing waits as long as six months to fill even junior-level positions at top salaries, says Baumann, and many programmes, including government and Clean Development Mechanism projects, are rate-limited by a lack of skilled workers and verifiers.

Facing the challenge

While US Republicans have promised to “stimulate the clean energy sector”, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has pledged to funnel federal money into job-training programmes for developing “green” workers. Neither side, however, has proposed a detailed plan on how to deliver on its promises. In the UK, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has proposed working with employers to create apprenticeships, and is calling for “Train to Gain” programmes in all environmental sectors of the British economy and a national skills academy for the environmental industries.

Although government programmes will play a critical role in solving climate change skills shortages, particularly at the more technical levels, preparing the executive level employees needed to drive the clean energy economy forward is a task that is falling in large part to companies themselves and progressive business schools.

Younger workers are beginning to benefit from a wide variety of course offerings in sustainability, the environment and renewable energy offered by universities. Some, such as Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina, even offer joint MBA/environmental science masters degrees that aim to give students the business savvy that they’ll need to be the next generation of strategists in the “clean economy”.

Universities and companies are working together in innovative ways to offer new training opportunities to students and workers. For example, ClimateCHECK has partnered with the Presidio School of Management to provide student internships and project-oriented learning programmes, which allow students to work with the company on climate change-related projects as part of their coursework in order to prepare them to meet the demand for climate change skills when they enter the workforce.

The California Public Utilities Commission and the state’s major utility companies, including PG&E and Southern California Edison, have established an as yet unnamed workforce advisory board that will collaborate with the state’s universities to be sure students receive the skills that they will need in the green economy. Although the programme is still taking shape and its goals and mechanisms are still being formulated, it is part of what many say is one key path forward to ensure a strong supply of clean energy workers in the future.

Some companies are even starting their own training programmes. Johnson Controls and GE Energy, for example, have created in-house programmes to train aspiring renewable energy professionals. GE has six different programmes, from internships for new MBAs to courses for experienced professionals wanting to transition into renewable energy.

Real or perceived?

Yet Andy Cartland, managing director at environmental recruitment specialist Acre, says the perceived lack of skilled workers may be just that – a perception.

“We have a lot of people coming to us looking for this kind of work,” Cartland says. “A lot of companies just don’t know yet where to find them and that can create a misconception that there aren’t enough skilled workers out there. We actually see a lot more candidates than jobs, it’s just that the necessary recruitment structure’s not out there in this area.”

Unlike older industries, such as financial services, there simply isn’t an established recruitment infrastructure of employment agencies, job boards and other places that clean economy employers can turn to in order to find skilled workers.

Cartland says that companies’ expectations at this stage in a relatively new market have to be realistic.

“If a company is saying they want someone with 20 years experience in climate-change strategy, I’m afraid they just don’t exist,” Cartland says. “But there are people out there with very similar environmental experience. A good environmental engineer, for instance, can turn their hand a number of directions.”

Clearly, developing and identifying the skilled workforce sought by government and industry will take a collaborative effort among a broad range of stakeholders to educate new workers, retrain existing ones and efficiently identify those ready to fill the ever growing demand for clean energy experts.


Useful links:
www.acre-resources.co.uk
www.climate-check.com
www.presidiomba.org
www.gaiahumancapital.com