The closure of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics last month was an occasion to reflect on a sphere where British performance has improved in the past 30 years. The last few Olympics and Paralympics have seen Top Ten or even Top Five finishes for the UK in the global medal table. GB Paralympians have always been top performers but for Olympians it is a far cry from placing 36th at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. At that time the UK’s performance in carbon emissions was similarly weak: in the early 1990s 67% of our electricity was generated by coal and the UK emitted 600Mt of CO2 per year.

Whole books have been written on this sporting progress (although fewer on the consistency of our Paralympians), but it boils down to having – and more importantly, developing – the right skills and resources to improve performance across a diverse base, and then enabling athletes to be the “best they can be”.

Paralympian success defies any narrow perception of what a medallist looks like, even though such high performance requires an advanced skill set in a specialist category, and a dedicated network and infrastructure in place to enable them to compete and win.

When it comes to green engineering skills, Britain must achieve a similar advance in the way we deliver energy over the coming decades. Accepting that we’re not looking at a world in which Britain wins a gold medal every year, can we at least be competitive with our peers and ensure that we are among the best at delivering the energy transition, in particular in the way we encourage and adapt the skills of the widest possible pool of people?

Scale of the challenge
At the Energy UK Annual Conference National Energy System Operator (Neso) chief executive Fintan Slye said: “I’m happy to stand here today and say that our analysis says that it is possible to achieve clean power by 2030”. But even Slye acknowledged massive challenges which require unprecedented innovation and speed in technology, regulatory approvals and planning, all of which require specialist skills which are not yet in sufficient supply.

There are three main areas where the UK needs to succeed in developing these skills: getting the right volume and type of green engineers in a changing environment; ensuring they reflect the communities they serve; and acquiring a development mentality. Key to all three is that we open the door to recognise people’s skills, even if they don’t look or behave ‘like an engineer’.

Getting the numbers
National Grid estimates that 400,000 roles will need to be filled over the next 25 years “to build the Net Zero Energy Workforce required.” Of these, 260,000 will be additional (equivalent to approximately 35% of the UK’s current energy workforce) and the remaining 140,000 will replace those who have left work. While around 216,000 workers could potentially transition from the (slowly) shrinking oil and gas sector, this still leaves a shortfall of 200,000 workers who need to be recruited and trained.
The raw numbers can only tell us so much. Sometimes, just a handful of people across Europe will be qualified to do a specialist job on a complex capital project and there is no guarantee that they will want to be based in the relevant parts of the UK for the length of the programme. The competition for these roles is international, and needs exceed the number of skilled candidates.

Meanwhile, the challenge for British companies not delivering national-scale transmission programmes is that they are competing for a limited pool of talent in corporate specialisms such as procurement and data management, as well as engineering and science-related disciplines.

Representing our communities
After re-skilling and recruitment, a second fundamental imbalance emerges; the profile of a typical UK utility’s skilled engineering workforce is not remotely representative of the communities which it serves, be it in gender, ethnicity or neurodiversity.

The workforce continues to lose employees after they have had career breaks. Energy & Utility Skills estimate that more than 75% of women who leave engineering after maternity leave or career breaks want to return, but are put off due to inflexible working hours and practices.

Fixing these issues is a matter of will as much as process, and individual companies are doing what they can. However, across Britain the pattern is a patchwork, rather than a coherent picture.

One of the biggest gains we can make is to open engineering to enable different abilities and approaches, based on a wider range of sensory processing, motor abilities, social (dis)comfort, and focus. Many technical roles simply don’t look the same as they did; for example, the inspection of difficult-to-access pipework can now be a case of guiding AI robots or smaller devices through the system, requiring expertise in remote technology, data management and a different set of motor skills. Thermal and acoustic imaging and LiDAR for scanning and mapping are increasingly supplementing or replacing hands-on techniques.

Neurodiversity can help here. To summarise crudely, ‘neurotypical’ individuals have less variation in their cognitive abilities and skills across different domains. Others have more significant peaks and troughs. Higher performance in some areas and challenges in others is more common in neurodivergent conditions. Supporting neurodiversity can yield benefits for the engineering profession in terms of creative approaches to problems or particular focus on specific project workstreams.

A development mentality

Government and industry must work more closely to attracting new talent and maintain the wealth of talent that it already has – “leaving it to the market” has had its day. Together we need to find a way of championing green engineering skills, not least showing young people both the fun they can have in the profession and its social worth (which research and experience shows is important for Gen Z).

We need to continue applying the “Baker Clause” – stipulating that schools must allow colleges and training providers access to every student in Years 8 to 13 to inform them about approved technical education qualifications and apprenticeships. We also need to innovate to increase the visibility of career paths in technical green skills and improve the appeal of entry-level apprenticeships.

There are promising signs; UCAS now provides an equivalent range of information on technical apprenticeships as it does on full degree programmes, and early outcomes for the new T-level graduates are promising. Utilities have a strong set of community programmes around their projects and can provide positive local platforms for young and diverse skills development through existing volunteering programmes and through engineers’ genuine if widely unrecognised community efforts to preserve the natural environment where they develop infrastructure.

As with Olympic success, attaining a sustainable, secure net zero energy system by 2050 is a mental and cultural challenge as much as it is a technical one. It needs the full force of the new Government to foster the right approach.

Andrew Marsh is an interim corporate communications manager in the utilities and automotive sectors