Do you know about the leading factors of the skill shortage in the energy sector?
The Energy Industry is changing and adapting to new trends and technologies due to the current digitalization of the sector. As every other sector, transformation is necessary to ensure the sector’s continuity in the future.
As the energy transition advances, so do the challenges faced by the relevant stakeholders in the sector. It is important to understand that skill gaps must be addressed by both businesses and education centers in order to avoid future problems.
A study done by Brunel reflects the leading factors of the skills shortage [1]:
1. Aging workforce:
The aging workforce is creating big skill gaps due to:
- Loss of expertise due to retirements
- Inadequate succession planning and knowledge transfer.
2. Lack of skilled staff
This lack of skilled staff is mainly due to:
- Less and fewer younger candidates/specialists are entering the industry, they are seeking for long lasting careers such as renewables.
- Lack of support or resources to help laid off workers find new roles, difficulty to re-hire workforce.
- Inadequate succession planning and knowledge transfer.
- Strict immigration laws that prevent companies from sourcing talent globally.
3. Insufficient Education and training
- Difficulty for companies to keep the training and education programs up-to-date.
- Inadequate succession planning and knowledge transfer.
- Slow adaptation of existing courses to innovation in the sector.
- No sufficient alignment between education centers and energy companies.
The energy transition is gradual and therefore workforce in the Oil & Gas Industry will be essential in the following years. In order to avoid this skill gap companies must upskill their workforce and make them adapt parallelly to the industry.
Different strategies are being chosen by energy companies in order to address this problem, such as changing the recruitment process by targeting new people which may transfer skills from other industries, expanding training programs for the existing workforce or collaborating with colleges to target top graduates and bring them to the business.
The Eddie project aims to reduce this existing skill gaps in the energy sector by creating a network which enhances collaboration between all of the relevant stakeholders, creating synergies between them and avoiding skill and education shortage.
Bibliography
[1]. https://www.brunel.net/en/blog/business-growth/energy-skills-shortage [Online].
