Baby boomers exit electric utility workforce as new technologies emerge: solutions for filling the skills gap

According to a 2015 workforce survey by the American Public Power Association (APPA), 55 percent of electric utilities reported that within five years at least 20 percent of their workforce will be eligible for retirement. [1] With the mass exodus of retirement age utility workers in sight, it’s time for your municipal utility or investor-owned utility (IOU) to prepare to maintain a workforce with the technical expertise and specialized skills to continue daily business operations.

On the heels of this transition, looms the necessity for your utility to take steps to transform into the “utility of the future” – an entity that among many initiatives must rethink traditional electric generation models and integrate alternative generation technologies.

Now consider if the employee recruitment and retention challenges common within your electric utility peers sound familiar:

• Aging workforce – As much as you’d like your experienced workers to happily work for your utility forever, they have other plans – i.e. retiring so they can travel the world or move closer to grandkids.
• Small qualified candidate pool – Technical expertise requires advance education and training. There’s more demand than supply for these highly qualified utility workers.
• Geography – Younger candidates may have their sights set on jobs and life in the big city instead of putting down roots in a smaller community.
• Lean utility operations – Operations have always run on thin margins. Stepping up staff recruitment, on-the-job training programs and technology investments are now really stretching time and monetary resources at a time when traditional electric generation models alone may not be paying the bills.
• Employee retention – The source of your workforce stability and institutional knowledge retention is retiring. Younger workers may not understand growth opportunities exist with your utility and therefore may plan to spend only a few years with you before seeking career advancement elsewhere.

Nodding your head? We thought so. Putting it all together, here’s what today – and tomorrow’s – public power utilities and IOUs are being asked to do: Recruit new workers with advanced skillsets into the utility industry to operate new and continually evolving technologies. And enrich the skillsets of the existing workforce. At the same time.

You probably aren’t the first to think powering down your whole operation is the only viable option — that you and your former utility customers will be just fine reading by candlelight and cooking and warming yourselves over an open fire.