Global Wind Workforce Outlook 2025-2030
Key Actions to Improve Workforce Preparedness
This trend is particularly evident in the offshore segment, where authorities and national wind industry associations play an influential role in project approvals and emphasise local economic benefits and community retention. When attracting investment in the energy transition, factors such as job creation and public infrastructure development are carefully considered. This report finds that collaboration between public agencies and investors in assessing local workforce readiness is an effective approach to project planning. This process involves examining the region’s industrial background and identifying transferable skills within the local workforce. In many contemporary governance models, the public sector tends to be less interventive for economic efficiency and lacks detailed, up-to-date knowledge of industry trends, technologies, and workforce needs. In this context, such collaboration
offers several benefits: it enhances public communication and provides a deeper understanding of workforce characteristics, including age and gender distribution. These insights bring greater clarity to project planning and help investors make informed decisions, such as whether alternative solutions are needed when certain technical roles are not available locally. They also guide strategies for knowledge transfer between technicians relocated from abroad and local workers – ensuring that long-term project maintenance and social benefits are sustained within the community.
Following these examples, the Global Wind Workforce Outlook has identified five core actions that are essential for ensuring local workforce readiness to support project development and long- term asset management: Stakeholder Engagement; Workforce Mapping; Define Asset Workforce Demand; Capacity Development and Knowledge Transfer; and Monitoring and Adaptation . For each action, while recognising that all tasks require collaboration between the public sector 9 and investors, the Outlook also identifies the most responsible party. The role of the duty holder is assigned by considering long-term operational needs, knowledge ownership, and sustainable community benefits. Tasks such as workforce assessment, capacity development, and monitoring are better led by the public sector, while defining workforce requirements and stakeholder engagement are best driven by investors or asset owners. This report presents this collaboration model (on the following page) as a useful example of how workforce-related considerations are embedded throughout the project lifecycle – from feasibility to operation and maintenance.
Local authorities and investors in many regions have begun jointly analysing workforce preparedness as part of project and investment planning. For example, CanREA’s National Workforce Development Strategy 6 in Canada, Ireland’s Building Our Potential: Offshore Wind Skills and Talent Needs 7 , and the workforce transition research in Victoria, Australia 8 all illustrate how closer partnerships between developers and local communities can enable more systematic evaluations of regional industry capacity and transferable skills. In these examples, closer partnerships between developers and local communities have supported more systematic assessments of regional industry capacity and transferable skills.
6 Canadian Renewable Energy Association. (2023, April). CanREA’s National Workforce Strategy for the wind, solar and energy storage industries (April 2023 Edition). Canadian Renewable Energy Association. 7 BVG Associates, Green Tech Skillnet & Wind Energy Ireland. (2024, January). Building Our Potential: Ireland’s Offshore Wind Skills and Talent Needs. Wind Energy Ireland. 8 EnergyAustralia. (2023, December). Transition Opportunities: Coal to Offshore Wind. Energy Australia. 9 Public Sector: The segment of the economy and governance that is controlled, funded, or regulated by government entities at the local, regional, or national level. This includes agencies, departments, and organizations responsible for policy-making, planning, regulation, and public services.
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Chapter 5: Energy Transition and Workforce Readiness
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