Energy at Work

Energy at Work is a blog series focused on one of the energy industry’s most critical assets: its people. As demand grows and the landscape evolves, developing a resilient, future-ready workforce is essential to sustaining reliability and long-term success.

Each installment brings perspectives from industry leaders on the strategies and partnerships shaping the energy workforce. From workforce development to education and policy alignment, Energy at Work highlights the ideas and approaches needed to strengthen the talent infrastructure powering the industry forward.

The Long Game

  By Missy Henriksen,

  Executive Director, Center for Energy Workforce Development

The Long Game: Why Our Energy Future Depends on a Shared Talent Pipeline

C-Suite leaders are professionally wired to focus on the horizon. In the energy industry, that means planning for the next decade of grid modernization, financing, and AI everything. But there is a silent, systemic risk that could stall even the most ambitious capital projects: the widening gap in our human infrastructure.

Addressing this challenge requires urgent, coordinated action—because no single company, and no single industry within the sector can move this mountain alone. We are competing against every tech giant and advanced manufacturer for a limited pool of skilled workers. Career awareness is low. Qualified instructors are scarce. Policymakers want to hear from us, but our voice isn’t reaching them at the volume it should. To win, we have to stop playing the “short game” of talent poaching and build a sustainable, industry-wide ecosystem.

Moving Mountains Through Collective Action

Workforce development goes beyond human resources and serves as a risk mitigation strategy. It’s best performed, to many leaders’ surprise, by working with industry colleagues through sector-wide solutioning, not just internal corporate functions. As the term implies, sector strategies unite businesses with shared geography or discipline to address talent pipeline challenges together. In practice, this looks like SMUD, Pacific Gas and Electric, Liberty Utilities, IBEW 1245, and others sitting together to develop common pre-hire training programs in collaboration with community partners. It looks like Spire and Ameren uniting with the Urban League of St. Louis on jointly developed pre-apprenticeship programs that have seen 50 people hired. It looks like the Michigan Energy Workforce Consortium uniting a broad array of energy employers in the state to ensure the adoption of energy curriculum in classrooms and development of workforce demand data to ensure training and hiring alignment between educators and employers. It looks like industry-created Registered Apprenticeship Programs with common knowledge, skills, and abilities versus individual training programs unique only to one company. It also involves coordinated multi-channel ad campaigns, including platforms like TikTok, to connect with our future workforce in places we don’t show up today.

Collective industry-wide action around workforce development is non-negotiable.

Shifting from “Consumers” to “Creators”

For decades, the industry acted as a consumer of talent by expecting the labor market to provide exactly what we needed. Today, we must be creators of that talent.

This means investing in varied recruitment pathways and wraparound supports that allow people, including discouraged workers, to see themselves in energy. When we collaborate on these frameworks, we share the “R&D” costs of human capital, making it more affordable for every company in the industry to strengthen their workforce—developers, utilities, those upstream, midstream, and downstream, contractors, labor partners, manufacturers, and all other essential industry stakeholders.

A few areas where shared investment pays off:

 Developing a curriculum for a lineworker or a nuclear technician is resource-intensive. When we standardize pre-hire education and certifications across the industry—especially for new and emerging areas—we ensure that a “ready-to-work” candidate in one region meets the high standards of another. That cuts onboarding costs and time-to-competency for everyone.

Individually, we have great companies. Collectively, we are an essential industry that powers life itself. Pooling our marketing efforts lets us reach Gen Z and Gen Alpha with a unified “Careers in Energy” message that no single company’s budget could achieve alone.

The “long game” means engaging students in middle school, not just at college career fairs. Joint initiatives seed interest early—ensuring the pipeline is full five to ten years before a job requisition is ever posted.

Right now, we have the greatest opportunity in 25 years to get energy curriculum adopted in schools nationwide, thanks to the new Energy and Natural Resources Career Cluster. Imagine that message being carried to every governor, every state Department of Education, and every regulatory commissioner by a unified industry voice. That’s real power.

The Only Play That Wins

We are at a crossroads. We can fight over a shrinking slice of the talent pie, or we can work together to bake a much larger one. Investing in workforce development—specifically through shared pre-hire education and long-term community engagement—is the only way to ensure our industry thrives as the backbone of the global economy.

CEWD exists to make that collaboration possible. Explore how your organization can take part in building a stronger, future-ready energy workforce.