Who Is Going to Deliver the Work?
The global energy industry has no shortage of ambitious projects.
New LNG facilities are being developed.
Power networks are expanding.
Data-centre construction is accelerating.
Renewable-energy capacity continues to grow.
Oil and gas projects are still progressing across several major markets.
But there is another issue sitting behind all of that investment:
Who is going to deliver the work?
The International Energy Agency estimates that global energy employment reached approximately 76 million people in 2024, increasing by more than five million since 2019.
Yet more than half of the 700-plus companies, trade unions and education providers surveyed by the IEA reported critical hiring bottlenecks.
And the shortages are particularly concentrated in applied technical roles.
That creates an interesting situation.
The energy industry doesn’t simply need more people.
It needs enough people with the right skills, at the right project stage, in the right location, at the right time.
And that is a much harder problem to solve.
What Does an Energy Skills Shortage Actually Mean?
“Skills shortage” has become an industry buzzword.
But it can be misleading.
There may be thousands of engineers and technicians available globally while a particular project still struggles to recruit the specific experience it needs.
For example, a project might not simply need an electrical technician.
It may need someone who has experience with:
- HV systems
- Protection
- Energisation
- Commissioning
- Switching
- Permit to Work
- Major-project environments
Likewise, a company may not simply need a commissioning engineer. It may need someone who understands systemisation, mechanical completion, completions management, functional testing, handover and start-up.
That distinction is important.
Recruitment shortages are often less about the number of people with a particular job title and more about finding people with the specific combination of experience required to safely deliver a project.
The Shortage Isn’t Theoretical
The IEA’s latest workforce research found that applied technical roles account for more than half of employment in the energy sector — more than double their share across the wider economy.
Employment in these roles has increased by approximately 2.5 million since 2019.
Among the occupations facing recruitment constraints are electricians, pipefitters, electrical power-line workers and engineers, particularly within nuclear.
And this isn’t confined to one energy sector.
The IEA’s 2026 work on renewable energy, grids and energy efficiency similarly identifies skilled-worker availability as a growing challenge to delivering energy infrastructure.
Wind provides another example.
The Global Wind Energy Council and Global Wind Organisation estimate that around 628,000 technicians will be required globally between 2025 and 2030 for construction, installation, operations and maintenance, with more than 40% expected to be new entrants to the industry.
So where could the pressure points appear?
To understand that, it helps to stop looking at projects as one single recruitment event.
Projects Don’t Recruit Everyone at Once
A major project moves through stages.
Engineering → Procurement → Construction → Mechanical Completion → Completions → Commissioning → Start-up → Operations
The workforce changes at every stage.
That means a project can move from having plenty of available labour to experiencing a shortage relatively quickly as it enters another phase.
Engineering and Project Development
Early in the project lifecycle, requirements can include:
- Process engineers
- Mechanical engineers
- Electrical engineers
- Instrument and controls engineers
- Civil and structural engineers
- Project engineers
- Planning and project controls
- Procurement and supply-chain specialists
- HSE professionals
At this stage, companies are turning a concept into something that can actually be built.
But the workforce requirement changes significantly once physical execution accelerates.
Construction: The Requirement Gets Bigger
Major construction programmes can require large multidisciplinary workforces.
Depending on the project, that can include:
- Electricians
- Instrument technicians
- Mechanical technicians
- Pipefitters
- Welders
- Riggers
- Scaffolders
- QA/QC inspectors
- Supervisors
- Construction managers
- HSE personnel
But quantity alone isn’t enough.
Projects need people familiar with the equipment, standards, procedures and environments involved.
And as construction moves towards completion, another change occurs.
Completions: The Bridge Between Construction and Commissioning
This stage can sometimes be overlooked outside major-project environments.
Building something isn’t the same as proving it is ready to operate.
Before commissioning can progress, projects need confidence that systems have been correctly installed, inspected, documented and handed over.
That creates requirements around:
- Mechanical completion
- Systemisation
- Punch management
- Turnover
- Preservation
- Documentation
- Completion databases
Experienced completions personnel understand how to move thousands of individual construction activities towards controlled system handover.
On complex projects, that experience can be extremely valuable.
Commissioning: Where Experience Becomes Critical
Commissioning is another area where simply increasing headcount doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.
Projects need people capable of understanding systems and safely taking them from a completed construction state towards operation.
Depending on the facility, that can require:
- Commissioning managers
- Commissioning engineers
- Commissioning technicians
- Electrical commissioning personnel
- Instrument commissioning personnel
- Mechanical commissioning personnel
- Control-system specialists
- Permit and isolation specialists
- Vendors and equipment specialists
And these people often need more than technical knowledge.
They need to understand how different systems interact.
They need to troubleshoot.
They need to assess risk.
They need to coordinate with construction and operations.
And they need to make decisions under schedule pressure without compromising safety.
That type of experience takes time to develop.
Start-Up and Operations Require Another Shift
Once commissioning progresses, projects begin transitioning towards operations.
The question changes from:
“Can we prove this system works?”
to:
“Can we operate and maintain this facility safely and reliably?”
Requirements can therefore move towards:
- Operations technicians
- Production technicians
- Control-room operators
- Maintenance technicians
- Reliability engineers
- Rotating-equipment specialists
- Electrical and instrument technicians
- Operations supervisors
- HSE personnel
For new facilities, operations teams may also become involved before start-up so they can gain familiarity with the systems they will eventually inherit.
Again, workforce planning has to happen before those people are urgently required.
The Same Skills Are Increasingly Competing Across Different Industries
This is where the labour challenge becomes particularly interesting.
An experienced electrical commissioning engineer might previously have spent an entire career moving between oil and gas projects.
Today, that same person could potentially be relevant to:
- Oil & Gas
- LNG
- Power
- Offshore Wind
- Nuclear
- Data Centres
The same applies to mechanical, controls, QA/QC, HSE and project-management professionals.
That means different industries can increasingly find themselves competing for overlapping talent pools.
For experienced workers, that’s potentially good news.
For recruiters and project owners, it creates another challenge.
How do you identify transferable talent rather than searching only for candidates who have already worked in exactly the same sector?
Job Titles Don’t Tell the Whole Story
This is one area where recruitment can become unnecessarily restrictive.
Consider two CVs.
One says:
Commissioning Engineer – Oil & Gas
Another says:
Commissioning Engineer – Data Centres
At first glance they appear to come from different industries.
But dig deeper and both professionals might have experience involving:
- Electrical systems
- Mechanical systems
- Functional testing
- System handover
- Permit to Work
- Isolation
- Troubleshooting
- Vendor coordination
- Documentation
- Operational readiness
There will still be sector-specific differences.
But automatically excluding one candidate because they haven’t previously worked in the target sector can dramatically reduce the available talent pool.
Recruitment needs to become better at understanding skills, not simply labels.
Candidates Have a Responsibility Too
The problem isn’t entirely on the recruiter side.
Candidates need to make their experience easier to understand.
A CV containing nothing more than:
Company | Job Title | Project | Dates
doesn’t tell a recruiter enough.
- What systems did you work on?
- What equipment?
- What project phase?
- What were you personally responsible for?
- What did you test, inspect, commission, operate or maintain?
- What standards and procedures did you work under?
- What happened as a result of your work?
Your job title gets you into a search.
Your actual experience determines whether you’re relevant.
Training Matters — But More Certificates Aren’t Always the Answer
A skills shortage doesn’t automatically mean everybody needs another training course.
Some roles genuinely require specific certification.
Someone entering offshore wind, for example, may require industry-specific safety and technical training.
But experienced professionals should avoid collecting qualifications simply because they think another certificate will make them employable.
The better question is:
What is preventing me from moving into the role I want?
- If it’s a genuine certification requirement, address it.
- If it’s lack of technical knowledge, learn it.
- If it’s poor CV positioning, fix the CV.
- If it’s lack of experience, understand what stepping-stone role could close that gap.
Training should solve a defined problem.
It shouldn’t become a substitute for career planning.
Recruiters May Need to Search Differently
There is a lesson here for employers and recruiters too.
If the same narrow candidate specification has been advertised repeatedly without success, the answer isn’t always to search harder.
Sometimes the search criteria need challenging.
- Which requirements are genuinely essential?
- Which can be trained?
- Which experience transfers from another industry?
- Which candidates have 80% of what’s required and could quickly learn the remaining 20%?
And most importantly:
Are we searching for a job title — or the capability needed to perform the job?
That distinction could become increasingly important as competition for experienced technical workers grows.
The Future Energy Workforce Will Be More Mobile
The future energy workforce is unlikely to sit neatly inside traditional sector boundaries.
People will move.
Oil & gas professionals will enter data centres.
Power professionals will move into renewables.
Military technicians may enter energy.
Wind technicians will progress into supervisory and commissioning positions.
Experienced workers will move between countries and projects.
And new entrants will need routes into industries currently dominated by experienced personnel.
The organisations that recognise those transferable skills could gain access to a considerably larger talent pool.
The professionals who understand how to demonstrate them could gain access to considerably more opportunities.
This Is the Opportunity for ERH
This is exactly the problem Energy Recruitment HUB is being built to address.
A CV shouldn’t simply sit in a database waiting for someone to search a job title.
ERH is developing a broader picture of the professional behind it:
- Experience
- Skills
- Career Pathways
- Technical capability
- Career Intelligence
- Recruiter visibility
For candidates, that means understanding where your experience could take you next and making your profile searchable to relevant recruiters.
For recruiters, it means building access to energy professionals whose experience may match a requirement even when their previous job title or sector isn’t identical.
Because solving the energy skills shortage won’t simply mean finding more people.
It will mean getting much better at identifying the people and skills we already have.
Be Ready Before the Requirement Arrives
If you’re an energy professional, don’t wait until your ideal vacancy appears before updating your profile.
- Make your skills visible.
- Keep your project history current.
- Understand where your experience transfers.
- Identify genuine gaps before they become barriers.
- And position yourself for the projects and sectors where your capabilities could be needed next.
Create your ERH profile, upload your CV and make your experience searchable to recruiters across the energy industry.