With growing global demand for energy and concerns over climate change, renewable energy industries worldwide are projected to be in a growth phase for the foreseeable future. That creates not only funding, political and infrastructure challenges, but workforce challenges as well.
geoAMPS has published a new article on the website www.altenergy.com about ways renewable energy industries can address these challenges. The article titled “Ways to build skills among renewable industries’ workforce” is published in the August/September 2014 edition of the Alternative Energy eMagazine.
Renewable energy industries are faced with hiring professionals with technical and management skills that will support and sustain each organization’s plans for growth. Because these individuals currently are in short supply, renewable energy companies are, in a large sense, engaged in a difficult war for workforce talent. They are competing with traditional energy companies for engineers and other workers with technical skills. At the same time, they are struggling to meet growing demand for leaders, business developers and other professionals.
Complicating these issues, especially in the United States and Canada, is the fact that the labor force is getting older. Because renewable energy industries are comparatively young, they are not experiencing the same pressures of an aging workforce as other industries.
But they are impacted. Renewable energy companies draw talent from traditional energy and other industries. Simultaneously, incoming workers lack skills and require substantial training. Renewable energy organizations tend to lack a systematic, disciplined approach to talent recruiting and workforce management. They tend to be more reactive than proactive. Not surprisingly, it is projected that by 2020 there will be a shortage of 3 million experienced workers in these industries.
The geoAMPS article discusses how organizations can alleviate these concerns by taking steps to increase institutional knowledge retention and process standardization within their workforce.
geoAMPS offers software solutions that can help achieve these goals that can benefit the organization both in the short term and the long term.
By 2030, it is projected that renewable energy industries could employ 6.3 million people worldwide, with 2 million of those in the United States alone. With expected retirements of a growing number of professionals in traditional and other industries, the pressure will increase on renewable energy industries to bring their new workers up to speed quickly. What organizations do today will impact the future health of the industries and the world’s response to climate change.
Dan Liggett is Communications and Public Relations Manager for geoAMPS, a technology company in the Columbus, OH, area that specializes in software solutions to manage land rights and infrastructure assets. For more information, call 614-389-4871 or visit www.geoamps.com. Check out the new Canadian version of our website: www.geoamps.ca.
