The average victim of the economic crisis will find it difficult to train up for a job in renewable energy

President Obama’s plan to turn around the US economy includes $150bn of investment in green energy over the next 10 years, driving America towards energy independence whilst creating five million ‘green collar’ jobs.

Nobody can question the need for the new US president to take action to resurrect the US economy or the need for the US to take a prominent role in the battle against climate change. However, creating five million renewable energy jobs for Americans will be more than challenging. The availability of economic capital to simulate growth is not all that’s needed – availability of human capital could be the real limiting factor.

When Obama talked about “green collar” jobs in recent times in relation to his New Energy for America Plan he referred more specifically to jobs within the renewable energy sector and its supply chain. The plan to create five million renewable energy jobs within 10 years would require hundreds of thousands of jobs to be filled each year. With such low numbers of engineers, scientist and mathematicians currently graduating through the current system how these numbers can be achieved is unclear.

Obama’s plan outlines a goal of retraining America’s currently manufacturing workforce to cope with the demands of the low carbon economy, which if achieved, will go some way to solving the US skills shortage.
Many of the skills currently used in heavy industry, manufacturing, and ‘old energy’ are quite easily, if not directly, transferable. Training someone to switch from a factory producing turbines for aeroplanes to a factory producing turbines for wind power generation may also be a viable option. However it goes without saying that it will be more of a challenge if the factory worker has spent much of their career building children’s toys.

Retraining skilled workers is going to be vital for the success of the current plan however it will not be enough to fill the engineering skills gap.

The renewable energy sector is already booming. While many other industries are making redundancies, recruiters in the renewable energy markets are being kept very busy. Today there is a growing skills shortage within the renewable energy sector globally. Many employers are still battling with a bottleneck that threatens the growth of their businesses and that of the whole sector. Offshore wind and project development are good examples of where demand for expertise currently considerably outstrips supply.
The industry is still in its relative infancy so unlike many other industries there are comparatively few professionals with more than a few years’ experience.

The majority of jobs within the alternative energy industry are also highly technical and based on engineering or scientific disciplines – skills which are currently in short supply.

Certainly, all growing companies need accountants, lawyers and human resources professionals but these are essentially ‘back office’ jobs and for every back office job there are five times as many ‘front office’ jobs: the engineers and technicians that are planning and building wind farms or designing, manufacturing and installing solar panels for example.

There will be jobs that can be carried out by low or semi skilled workers but these will be in the minority.

The creation of several million highly technical jobs may be little consolation to the hairdresser, shop manager or average person in the street who may have recently lost their job through redundancy.

In 2005, Duke University released a set of figures (based on graduates of a 4 year engineering degree) which concluded that 70,000 US engineering students were graduating each year compared to 351,537 annual engineering graduates in China. That’s five times the US total.

This is not just an American problem, as highlighted in the OECD policy paper “Evolution of Student Interest in Science and Technology Studies” published in 2006: in the past 15 years there has been a decrease in the relative number of graduating engineers in Europe.

The problem is even more acute in the UK than in the EU as a whole. The number of engineering graduates, currently around 22,000 per annum, has steadily fallen over the last ten years, despite a rising trend in the number of students at university. Engineers used to make up 11% of the annual total of graduates in 1998. By 2007, the figure had dropped to 7%.

The western world is currently not producing enough engineers and those who do graduate with technical degree have many career options to choose from including working in the telecommunications, nanotechnology, computing and automotive industry.

It is widely accepted that in many countries such as the UK there is a distinct lack of qualified teachers across all of the science, engineering, technology and math (STEM) subjects, and at all levels. This needs to be addressed urgently, but we also need to address prospective students’ perception of the “engineer” brand including addressing issues such as comparatively poor levels of pay, tackling our failure to connect with talented students, and actively pursuing policies to attract students to STEM related studies at first degree level.

In developing countries, like India and China, engineers are apparently held in far higher regard than in developed countries. This is possibly due to the very obvious impact that large infrastructure projects can have on everyday lives and local communities.

In last year’s ‘Energy Pulse’ survey conducted by the energy services firm Doosan Babcock, the vast majority of energy experts highlighted a serious lack of skills as a major problem for the energy industry as a whole.

Unless the number of students taking science, engineering, technology and math (STEM) based qualifications in the western world increases dramatically, this skills shortage will become even more apparent and constraining for US businesses. It is beginning to look untenable that the new green collar jobs can be made available only to domestic applicants – according to Obama’s plans of creating jobs that cannot be outsourced – due to the engineering skills shortage.

If we fail to address the lack of available, qualified and appropriately skilled workers, talk of millions of new jobs being filled within the renewable energy sector is likely to remain just talk.

Sam Newell is a specialist recruiter within the renewable energy sector and the founder of RenewableEnergyJobs.com.