With the rapid expansion of offshore wind on the horizon, a new report, ‘Workforce Foresighting for Offshore Wind 2030-2035’, from the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult, highlights ways in which the UK can increase the current offshore wind industry workforce from 40,000 people to between 75,000 and 94,000, which is vital for clean power to be achieved by 2030.
The report consolidates findings from five linked studies conducted between 2023 and 2025, to identify the future skills needed to support emerging technologies, and ensure the UK remains globally competitive.
Danielle Portsmouth, Future Skills Manager, ORE Catapult said:
“The UK is a global leader in offshore wind experience and installed capacity, attracting significant investment and playing a crucial role in the nation’s clean energy transition. However, without a clear focus on increasing the pipeline of skills and talent into the sector, we will not be able to maintain this position.
“Without immediate action, the capabilities and capacity of our current workforce will be insufficient to achieve the UK’s 2030 targets in offshore wind. There is little, if any, time to spare. If started now, the full cycle of developing course content, recruiting learners, re-skilling and providing new employees with the opportunities to gain on-the-job experience, will take until 2030.”
Huge opportunities exist for talented jobseekers to join the UK’s expanding offshore renewable energy sector as it works to achieve the UK’s Clean Power target to deploy 43-50 GW of offshore wind by 2030.
The report highlights a fundamental challenge: the UK’s education and training systems often struggle to keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies. It proposes that we shift from a ‘lagging’ model, where training addresses existing industry demand, to a ‘leading’ model where skills development anticipates future needs.
The Workforce Foresighting report was sponsored by RenewableUK, which represents over 500 companies active in the UK’s renewable energy sector.
James Lord, RenewableUK’s Skills and Social Value Manager, said: “To maintain the UK’s world-leading position in offshore wind, we must ensure that our workforce has the right skills and capabilities as technology evolves. This means that people entering the sector need the training and skills to fit the highly specialised jobs which will be on offer when they step into the workforce in the years ahead.
“This report identifies a series of vital measures which will enable us to fill specific key roles with staff who have appropriate levels of expertise and experience to achieve this, creating tens of thousands of high-quality well-paid jobs throughout the UK.
“It also highlights the fact that there’s no time to lose – we need to take action now so that the capabilities and capacity of our workforce will be sufficient to build the vast pipeline of projects which will be rolled out to meet the UK’s ambitious offshore wind targets.”
The report concludes that delivering the UK’s offshore wind ambitions will depend not only on investment and technology, but on simultaneously building a more responsive, flexible, skills ecosystem. To meet the skills development challenge, role archetypes are proposed as offering a more agile approach, enabling educators to focus on new and emerging capabilities, without the need to redesign entire courses for each new role that emerges.
Examples of roles that need to be filled include wind turbine technicians, high voltage (HV) cable specialists, installation engineers, fabrication specialists, planning officers, technical managers, cable and design engineers, and electrical managers.
The report proposes the following actions:
- Initiate working groups across the UK’s education and offshore wind sectors to focus on the skills value chain
- Identify sector champions for five emerging technology areas, which include Dynamic Cable Systems; Remote and Autonomous Systems for Operations and Maintenance in UK Offshore Wind; Automated Welding for Offshore Wind Flotation Structures; Advancing the Manufacture of Wind Turbine Blades, and UK Production of HVCD (High voltage direct current) Cable Systems
- Work with industry partners and skills initiatives to share knowledge and insights, including support to develop an MSc in Renewable Energy
- Extend the reach of ORE Catapult’s Workforce Foresighting activity to develop a tool that allows online access to archetypes, capabilities and occupational profile datasets.
The report identifies critical elements within education that need to be implemented immediately, including the development of course content, recruiting learners, re-skilling, and providing new employees with opportunities to gain on-the-job experience.
The UK Government has committed over £100 million over three years to support engineering skills development for the sector.
