Addressing a Skilled Trades Gap in the Energy Sector—and How to Ease the Transition
Increasing demands on the energy sector are driving a handful of serious workforce challenges. One of the most concerning is an aging workforce with high levels of retirement, colliding with a shortage of skilled workers to fill the gaps.
Case in point—the average age of U.S. utility workers is more than 50 years old, several years older than the national average for other industries—and there simply aren’t enough younger workers in the pipeline to address the issue.
One of the drivers of these gaps? A significant reduction in workforce training programs in the 1980s and an overemphasis on the importance of a college education. This has contributed to the low number of workers able to move into middle- and upper-management positions as the baby boomers retire, leaving a massive gap in legacy knowledge, an important factor that has kept most skilled-trade industries, including the power generation sector, moving forward for the past few decades.
