Grid modernization and enhanced reliability to meet emerging load demands are pressing concerns for utilities and power organizations. Yet many of them are trying to deliver this work with hard-to-fill technical roles, changing skill requirements, and limited internal capacity.
A strong energy workforce plan helps you prepare before vacancies affect projects, maintenance schedules, or customer service. During recent years, the need for a more capable utility workforce has been increasing.
The 2025 U.S. Energy and Employment Report indicates that jobs in the transmission, distribution, and storage segments grew by 2.7% in 2024, adding 38,100 new jobs. Traditional transmission and distribution accounted for an additional 26,400 jobs.
The growing number of jobs in these segments intensifies the competition for workers with expertise in a variety of utility operational fields.
Why Skill Shortages Are Difficult for Utilities to Manage
Workforce gaps in the power sector are not limited to one occupation. You may need lineworkers for grid expansion, engineers for system design, technicians for plant and substation maintenance, project managers for capital programs, and specialists for cybersecurity, data, and automation.
These roles take time to develop. New employees may require licensing, technical instruction, safety training and supervised field experience. Demand is growing at the same time.
BLS projects about 10,700 openings for electrical power-line installers and repairers each year from 2024 to 2034. It also projects around 17,500 annual openings for electrical and electronics engineers. Many openings will result from workers changing occupations or leaving the labor force.
So, your strategy must address recruitment, development, retention, and knowledge transfer together.
What Is Energy Workforce Planning?
Energy workforce planning involves forecasting the skills, positions, and staffing levels your business will require over a set period. Planning in this way integrates talent and workforce planning with business operational strategies, major projects, statutory and regulatory requirements, and the evolving technology landscape.
An actionable plan involves identifying the work, the roles required to accomplish it, the workforce’s time and location, and how gaps will be filled through recruitment, development, temporary staffing, or external partnerships.
This helps avoid situations when the demand for a new role leads to an urgent recruitment drive. It enables the organization to direct recruitment budgets to roles with the highest operational risks.
This helps finance and operations managers understand and evaluate the risks and costs associated with labor and the operational delivery for each worksite, as well as the recruitment drive lead time for each worksite.
How Utilities and Power Companies Can Address Skill Shortages
- Forecast Talent Needs Against the Project Pipeline
Start with the work, not the current organization chart. Always review planned generation projects, transmission upgrades, maintenance outages, storm-hardening work, smart-meter programs, and digital initiatives.
Then map roles to each phase. Engineering may begin months before construction, while field crews may be needed during installation and commissioning. Operational roles will continue after project completion.
It is also important to create forecasts for the next 90 days, 12 months, and three to five years. Short-term planning supports outages and project peaks. Similarly, long-term planning supports apprenticeships, succession, and leadership development.
- Build a Skills Inventory, Not Just a Headcount Report
A report documenting the number of employees provides insight into the total headcount. However, it does not provide insight into the team’s ability to successfully complete the required work.
To avoid this issue, create a skills inventory which may include workforce competencies such as licenses, certifications, experience with specific equipment, safety records, digital skills, and exposure to particular projects. Where applicable, include contractors in the inventory. Finally, compare the skills inventory with the future expected demand.
- Prioritize Roles by Operational Risk
Not every job vacancy offers the same impact. So, you need to classify roles by their effect on safety, reliability, compliance, project schedules, and revenue.
A vacant protection and controls position may delay a substation project. A shortage of experienced operators may increase fatigue. An unfilled cybersecurity role may leave essential systems exposed.
Use this risk view to decide which positions require permanent hiring, which can use contractors, and which skills should be developed internally. Critical roles should have named successors, documented processes, and backup staffing options.
- Use a Proper Mix of Permanent and Flexible Talent
Utilities often have fluctuating workforce needs. Planned outages, emergency restoration, and grid modernization programs can create sharp increases in demand.
Permanent hiring is ideal for roles that are filled on an ongoing basis. Contract employees are ideal for temporarily meeting demand for specialized roles. Contract-to-hire is an option for assessing the appropriate fit for the role prior to employee placement.
The objective is not to replace staff with contract employees, but to ensure the work is completed if the needed employees are unavailable. You can reach out to dedicated staffing partners who can help streamline and balance this hiring approach.
- Support Apprenticeships and Early-Career Pipelines
Waiting on the availability of experienced talent does not address a structural talent shortage. Create partnerships with community colleges, universities, unions, technical/vocational training programs, and military transition programs.
Provide apprenticeships, other work-based training programs, and internships. Clearly define your training and support pathway to ensure commitment from your trainees. If employees-in-the-making understand the training and support they will receive, the expectations of the role, and the potential career pathway, they will be more likely to commit.
Hiring managers also require time to ensure the new hire is properly trained. Hiring unskilled workers also requires a significant time commitment to ensure they are properly supervised.
- Transfer Knowledge Before Experienced Employees Leave
Knowledge transfer initiatives should begin before a retirement notice is received. Identify the employees and roles that are critical to the organization. Ensure that information such as key failure patterns, vendors, systems, and legacy information is documented.
Provide training through job shadowing and paired assignments. Ask employees to prepare training and instructional materials and provide training. Consider hiring them again on a short-term basis.
- Reskill Employees for Emerging Utility Roles
With advances in technologies such as smart meters and storage, the demand for different skills will continue to evolve. CEWD noted that between 2021 and 2023, jobs in new technologies grew fourfold, even though they accounted for 2.6% of the work studied.
Before you compete externally for every new capability, consider who can be reskilled internally. Automation requires system knowledge, which may come from some of your technicians. Engineers can learn storage integration or grid analytics. Internal mobility helps manage the hiring burden and retain knowledge within the business.
- Improve Retention in High-Pressure Roles
Constant hiring puts pressure on existing employees. Emergency callouts and the resulting delays in project completion may lead to increased staff turnover.
Analyze regrettable turnover, absenteeism, and time taken to reach productivity and consider the impact of the turnover of first-line managers on the business. Examine the flexibility of work hours, travel, promotion opportunities, and poor work scheduling on employee turnover.
Retention hinges on employees’ daily work experience. They deserve safe working conditions, reliable resources, good supervision, and ample opportunities for professional growth.
- Create an External Talent Bench Before Demand Peaks
You shouldn’t begin sourcing only after a project is approved or an outage is scheduled. Keep in touch with specialists and articulate requirements clearly.
An external staffing partner can help map regional talent, attract passive candidates, and hire across several locations. This is particularly useful when your recruiting team is managing several technical roles or if project timelines require rapid scaling.
Agreeing on the basics of screening requirements, safety, and certifications will ensure you maintain quality. Preparation will allow you to act quickly.
Metrics That Make Workforce Planning More Effective
Regular review of the plan is critical. Useful measures include the duration of vacancies in key business roles, the internal fill rate, time to employee productivity post-training, dependency on contractors, turnover, and overtime.
Link these indicators to operational measures. Relate vacancies in staffing to outage lengths, backlogs in maintenance, safety issues, or delays in projects. This encourages management to consider operational discipline in workforce planning, distinguishing it from HR.
Final Thoughts
Proper planning helps to mitigate disruptive skill shortages. Daily operational and long-term modernization goals can be achieved through demand forecasting, critical capability identification, knowledge transfer, and adaptable hiring models.
SPECTRAFORCE provides utility staffing solutions through direct hire, staff augmentation, project-based staffing, RPO, and other workforce models to help utilities and power companies recruit well.
We share qualified candidate profiles within an average of 1.5 days, helping you respond quickly without losing focus on fit.
