Day 3: “A Working Week to Solve the Wind Energy Talent Shortage”

This week Clare Buxton is looking at how to manage the talent shortage in the Wind Energy sector, whether you’re hiring or looking to be hired. We’ve established what and why, but how do we proactively manage it?

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What companies can do

The burning question, another one that EcoSearch hears frequently, is:

“How do we overcome the talent shortage?”

I wish I had an easy answer. Here are a few suggestions:

If you represent a company and want to build your team:

• Draw on international experience – in the UK we often suffer from an island mentality, but there is life out there… We need to be attracting talent from Europe, the USA and Asia to come and work with us in the UK. If you’re in Europe, think cross-border. This is a global market.

• Work hard at building an attractive and welcoming work culture to position yourself favourably against your competitors. Gen X and Gen Y are sucked in by a “fun place to work” and “a good culture fit” – it is fundamental to attracting and retaining the best talent out there.

• Work on building good training programmes. It’s easy to want to “skip over” the training piece, but if you have an expertise centre with a career track to train and improve your staff, it will become easier to hire individuals who aren’t already the finished article, but who could become that expert you are looking for in 6 months or 1 year.

• Work with a recruitment professional who understands the industry, and can help to promote your brand, as well as scope the talent pool confidentially. (That’s where we come in…)

Tune in tomorrow to find suggestions for industry professionals looking to get hired that will help you get to the next rung on the EcoLadder.

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