Working smarter, not just harder: The real answer to the energy workforce crisis

At International Energy Week in February, one story from the awards ceremony quietly made the most compelling argument of the week. DTEK, the Ukrainian energy company, won the Workforce Award for doing something that sounds almost obvious in hindsight: recruiting women for underground mining roles, enabled by Ukraine’s removal of the longstanding legal ban on women working below ground. With 55,000 staff and over 15 per cent of its male workforce mobilised for military service, DTEK faced a stark choice — wait for a workforce that was not coming, or rethink who the workforce could be.

They chose to rethink. And they delivered.

That story is a parable for the energy sector as a whole. The conversation about workforce in the energy transition has become dominated by a single, familiar anxiety: we do not have enough people. The skills gap is real, the pipeline is too slow, and the demand is accelerating. All of that is true. But it is also incomplete. Because the organisations that will navigate this decade most successfully are not simply those that recruit the most, they are those that think most clearly about how to use the people they already have, and what technology can do to extend their reach.

The numbers are not in dispute. My colleague Joseph Perry’s piece in this series is clear about the scale: over 56,000 vacancies need to be filled across the RIIO-T3 and ED3 periods alone, in roles (overhead linesperson, cable jointer, HVDC engineer) that carry training lead times of years, not months. The International Energy Agency (IEA)’s World Energy Employment analysis puts it even more starkly: more than half of energy firms are now reporting critical hiring bottlenecks, and the energy workforce is ageing faster than new entrants can replace it.

In the UK construction sector specifically, the workforce is down 12 per cent from its pre-pandemic level and would need to grow by over 40 per cent to meet planned spending ambition if productivity growth stays flat. The honest conclusion is that it will not grow that fast. Not through domestic pipelines alone. Not at the pace the transition requires.

But here is what tends to get lost in that conversation: volume and capability are not the same problem, and solving for one does not automatically solve for the other. The energy transition does not simply need more people. It needs people who can work differently: across disciplines, across data and operations, across the boundaries that historically separated engineering, commercial, and digital functions. And it needs organisations that are structured to get the most from those people once they have them.

The instinctive response to a skills shortage is to treat technology as a substitute: if we cannot find enough engineers, perhaps AI and automation can fill the gap. This framing is both understandable and wrong.

The more important role technology plays is as a force multiplier for the workforce you do have. National Grid’s deployment of autonomous aerial inspection drones – the first centralised capability of its kind globally – is a useful illustration. Freeing skilled engineers from routine tower and conductor surveys does not eliminate the need for engineers. It redirects their time and expertise towards work that genuinely requires human judgement. The same logic applies to AI-driven schedule risk analysis that can detect the early signatures of delay before they become lost time, or predictive maintenance tools that direct field teams to the assets that actually need attention rather than those that happen to be on the schedule.

The productivity argument here is significant. If the workforce cannot grow by 40 per cent, it needs to become meaningfully more productive. That is not a question of enabling technology in isolation, it requires redesigning how work is organised, what decisions field teams are empowered to make, and what data they have access to when they are standing in front of an asset. As David Hart’s piece argues, the value of connected data systems is not the connection itself, but the patterns it reveals and the decisions it enables. Technology deployed without organisational redesign to match it produces marginal gains at best.

The DTEK example points to something deeper than workforce planning. It points to the assumptions embedded in how organisations define their talent pool in the first place.

In the UK energy sector, the structural underrepresentation of women and minorities in technical and operational roles is well documented. Several leaders at International Energy Week raised it explicitly, not as an equity issue in isolation, but as a resilience and capability issue. A workforce drawn from a wider pool is a workforce that is less likely to fail collectively, more likely to bring diverse approaches to novel problems, and more likely to reflect the communities whose energy systems it operates.

The same logic extends to adjacent workforces that are systematically overlooked. Ex-military personnel carry transferable technical skills, operational discipline, and experience of high-stakes decision-making under pressure that many energy programmes desperately need. Workers from declining industrial sectors – steel, offshore oil and gas – bring hands-on infrastructure experience that cannot be replicated quickly through graduate pipelines. Apprenticeship and vocational routes, still under-invested relative to degree-level hiring in much of the sector, reach talent pools that traditional recruitment systematically misses.

None of this removes the need to grow the pipeline from the beginning: from schools, from universities, from international recruitment where the domestic supply genuinely cannot meet demand. But it does challenge the assumption that the workforce shortage is purely a supply problem. Some of it is a demand-side problem: organisations looking for talent in too narrow a range of places,or designing roles and working conditions that exclude the people they could otherwise attract.

Even where organisations have recruited well and deployed technology thoughtfully, there is a higher-order capability challenge that often goes unaddressed: can the organisation actually use what it knows?

Craig Hoggett’s piece makes the point with precision in the context of capital delivery: that sensing capability is scaling faster than decision capability, and that AI creates value only where organisations have the structures to act on what it reveals. The same principle applies to workforce capability. A highly skilled engineer whose insights cannot reach decision-makers, whose recommendations require four layers of sign-off, or whose field experience is never fed back into planning systems, is a workforce asset that is substantially underused.

This is the capability architecture problem. It sits above individual skills and below organisational strategy, in the middle layer of how work is actually organised: who has authority to act, how information flows between operational and commercial functions, whether the people closest to the assets have a voice in how they are managed. Organisations that get this right compound their workforce advantage over time. Those that do not find that even well-recruited, well-trained teams underperform against the complexity they face.

The hybrid profile – the engineer who understands commercial models, the programme manager who can interrogate a data model, the asset manager who can articulate portfolio-level risk – is the scarce resource that cannot be simply imported or quickly trained. It is developed deliberately, inside organisations, through roles that are intentionally designed to build breadth alongside depth. That is a long investment. But it is also the one most organisations have been slow to make.

Three practical implications follow for those responsible for building and managing the workforce the energy transition requires.

Productivity is a strategy, not a residual. Waiting for the pipeline to fill is not a workforce plan. Leaders who are serious about delivery in this decade need to be equally serious about what each person in their organisation can achieve through better data access, better decision authority, and better-designed roles. A 20 per cent productivity improvement across an existing workforce is worth more, and is faster to achieve, than a 20 per cent headcount increase.

Talent pool assumptions need to be challenged explicitly. Most organisations are not failing to attract talent from diverse sources because they have tried and failed; they have not tried systematically. Structured programmes for ex-military, adjacent-sector workers, women returners, and vocational entrants are not supplementary initiatives, they are part of a serious response to a structural supply gap.

Capability architecture is as important as skills development. Training individuals without redesigning how the organisation uses their capabilities produces diminishing returns. The governance structures through which knowledge flows, decisions are made, and operational insight reaches strategic planning are as much a workforce issue as recruitment and retention.

The workforce challenge facing the energy transition is genuine and serious. But framing it purely as a shortage, a gap between the people needed and the people available, risks producing solutions that are too narrow for the problem.

DTEK’s award at International Energy Week was a small but telling signal. The organisations that will build and operate the energy system of the next decade will not be those that simply hired the most. They will be those that were clearest about who could do the work, most deliberate about building the capability to do it well, and most honest about what technology could enable and what it could not replace.

The workforce of the future is, in large part, already here. The question is whether we are organised to use it.