CleanBeta

Green Jobs Growing On Trees

Add this to the long list of global shortages: engineers and highly-skilled manual laborers.

Over the past decade, the proliferation of massive infrastructure and energy projects in nearly every corner of the world has resulted in shortages of everything from cement to construction cranes. Despite a few delays here and there, these shortages haven’t sapped progress from being made towards completing most of these projects. But as a new generation of nuclear power plants, LNG terminals, oil refineries, wind farms and solar parks begin to migrate from conceptual designs to construction sites, a growing labor crunch could prove to be more intractable previous shortages.

In the United States, a looming wave of retirements, dearth of mid-career technical workers and a sharp drop in the number of engineering graduates entering the work force in the past 20 years threaten to delay completion of important new energy and infrastructure projects scheduled to begin in the coming years.

“In previous cycles, we were always up in one area and down in another and could move people around to meet our needs,” said Keith Stephens, a company spokesperson for the Irving-Tex.-based engineering firm, Fluor. “For example, energy projects might be up and chemical projects down. But now we need people for every sector at the same time.”

Over the next decade, engineering jobs are set to rise by nearly 50%. In 2005, U.S. universities awarded 76,000 engineering degrees, 11% lower than the number awarded in 1985. Meanwhile, the energy industry’s current work force in everything from coal to nuclear is facing huge numbers of retirements in the next decade. In the next five years, roughly 20,000 veterans of the nuclear industry - or 35% of the entire nuclear work force - will reach retirement age.

“It’s a very tight market and has gotten tighter over the past two or three years,” said Stephens. “The baby boomers are approaching the retirement age, after the downturn in the ’80s and ’90s there is a dearth of experience in the mid-level range and the graduating class sizes are smaller than they used to be.”

In previous years, companies could avoid labor shortages by poaching foreign talent from abroad with the promise of better salaries and so forth. That will be far more difficult now considering the intense international competition heats up for engineering talent. The hunt for engineering talent has become a global phenomenon. Europe is already feeling the pinch of tight engineering labor markets. In Germany, Europe’s largest economy, the number of engineering vacancies rose by nearly 30% in 2007 to roughly 25,000. Similarly, engineers from developing countries that would have once remained in the United States are frequently returning to take advantages of new opportunities in their countries.

While the engineering positions might be the hardest to fill, they are hardly the only positions that need to be filled in the energy and infrastructure project boom. On the contrary, labor shortages have begun to appear across the entire production chain. For example, more than half of all utilities workers will become eligible for retirement will become eligible for retirement over the next five years. The situation is almost as bad in the oil and gas industry, where the average worker is over 47 years old.

In fact, skilled labor shortages could develop at nearly any point of the entire production chain. For example, the number of coal miners in the nation dropped from 159,777 in 1990 to 99,358 by the end of 2003, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration. In addition, more than half of all miners are older than 50 and will soon start leaving the work force, creating tens of thousands of vacancies to fill.

Meanwhile, the clean energy boom has been half boon and half bane in terms of the industry’s work force options. The cache of wind power and solar energy has encouraged a growing number of young engineers to pursue careers in the energy industry, but has simultaneously tightened the market for highly-skilled laborers.

For decades, crafts workers, or workers trained in very specific technical disciplines like welding or metal cutting, have been downsized, outsourced, offshored and otherwise expunged from the work force in droves. For better or worse, these workers are nowhere near as obsolete as the past twenty years have made them seem. On the other hand, they are in very, very short supply.

“We’ve had just as much trouble finding crafts workers as we’ve had finding engineers,” said Stephens.

Even now, the coal industry is having trouble finding recruits. The vast majority of eligible younger workers are pursuing careers in clean energy, which is happy to have them. In July, the Fairfield, Conn.-based industrial-giant General Electric donated several millions of dollars to Mesalands Community College in Tucumcari, New Mexico to launch a wind-technician training program. The program’s graduates will have two years of experience building and operating wind-turbines and wind farms under their belt. GE has agreed to hire every graduate of the new school for the next three years.