Not enough ‘Energy Experts’ to meet the demand of ‘Climate Change’.
Over my many years of working within the energy sector and seeing it grow, I still believe there are not enough energy experts within the industry to deliver the task. The task being, as human beings, to drive down kWhs, reduce emissions and save our planet. I have seen the volume of experts increase exponentially but the growth is just not enough. The growth over the years has seen many people redirect their core skills and embrace energy management but not always adopting the correct career paths. This provides problems as the industry needs sound advice being deployed to organisations in order to make big changes.
The implications to this shortfall are that across the world, organisations are not going to make changes, business costs are not going to decrease, kWhs are going to keep increasing and our world will slowly slip into a non-returnable process of climate change.
I always say that we cannot stop climate change completely but we can slow it down. That statement comes from many years of being isolated in my UK “bubble” with the frustrations of slow engagement of organisations and a lack of real energy experts in our industry. Since then the world has opened up and we have seen many energy experts rising to the top.
Due to the obvious and this pandemic, the world has become smaller and technology has exploded the opportunities of being able to easily communicate all over the world. This morning alone, I had a zoom call with an architect in Thailand and last night I completed a Podcast with a newly found friend in North Carolina where we were discussing the solar industry. It all provides game changing opportunities.
There is no real clear solution to this other than education and sharing knowledge needs to evolve. I have recently been bombarded by individuals wanting to develop their careers in the sustainability and the energy industry which is admirable and I have been witnessing countries developing initiatives to train and develop engineers into energy managers.
This is all positive but it needs to be structured with entry level training and knowledge shared from what I would call the ‘elders’ of our industry, and yes, dare I say, the energy managers with the ‘grey’ hair.
In 1980, when I was an apprentice I probably spent two years following an “elder”. Obviously I thought I knew best sometimes, but every time I strayed from my given post, I would either be told as much or I would learn a valuable lesson. Today we call this mentoring and we would have been assigned a mentor. Can you imagine what would happen if every energy expert around the world had a mentee working with them? Over a period of two years, the energy expert resource would double and in four years if the mentees become mentors we would be looking at quadruple numbers.
Now I’m probably in a dream world here, but this is why I’m developing “B2B Energy Experts” and supporting the industry with ‘Knowledge’. I am very proud to have witnessed 40 years of this industry and I’m happy to repay it all back with the sharing of my knowledge as well as providing and sharing insights from my global network.
My belief is that we need to grow this industry as well as ensuring the industry is constantly learning with other skills like sales, marketing and business. An all round energy expert needs to be sustainable and he or she needs to have secondary skills in order to deliver the outcome we need.
If our industry embraces mentoring and a skills matrix of training in both technical and management, our world and our beautiful planet will reap the benefits. With the amalgamation of energy supply experts, energy managers and environmentalists, climate change will then slow and could even stop.
Energy experts around the world need to be embracing training, aligning themselves with governing bodies and reviewing their skills matrix. If you are an ‘Elder’, start mentoring and growing our industry. I have a mentoring program that I work with which randomly supports people and I provide my own time too. We all need to invest our time and we all need to make a difference to our journey.