Dive Summary:
- The 400,000-strong utility workforce is projected to lose up to 40% of its members by the end of 2013 as thousands of baby boomers punch out the time clock for the last time, the Task Force on America’s Future Energy Jobs found in June.
- In an article for Harvard Business Review, IBM executives Michael Valocchi and Mozhi Habibi came up with a three-part solution to overcoming the coming talent shortage in the utility industry: groom more data scientists, partner with universities to get the attention of the next generation and collaborate with technical and vocational schools to promote trade skills.
- The talent shortage is a growing problem and is becoming all the more apparent as smart technologies requiring advanced data analytics penetrate the utility business.
From the article:
August 14th marked the tenth anniversary of the US’s worst-ever blackout, a grid failure that left more than 50 million North Americans in the dark for days. While experts agree the grid has improved since then, the economic toll still looms according to a recent White House report. To avoid these costly disruptions, investment in both the workforce and the infrastructure is a rising imperative around the world, both in mature markets such as North America, Western Europe as well as the growing economies such as Latin America, Africa and Middle East.
A new generation of smarter energy technologies, coupled with a workforce that is just as digitally savvy, holds great promise to ensure reliability of the grid, decrease economic losses due to power outages, and meet the world’s growing demand for power. There is time, technology, and will to avoid this fate, but the clock is ticking.
