In the coming years, the wind industry will be looking for workers for the expansion of renewable energies on a large scale. The expected doubling of the installed wind power capacity by 2030 “cannot be done without increasing the workforce,” said the managing director of the Federal Wind Energy Association, Wolfram Axthelm, the German Press Agency. This will “not mean having 100 percent more staff, but there will be a significant increase in staff,” he added. “We’re talking about tens of thousands.”
On the one hand, companies are confronted with the shortage of skilled workers, which almost all sectors of the economy have been complaining about for some time. “Almost everyone in the industry is hiring new people at the moment and the main thing they realize is that you’re competing with others, that you have to make an effort to find people,” Axthelm said. In addition, companies in the wind industry are still struggling with the aftermath of the enormous downsizing in recent years, a consequence of the sluggish expansion of wind energy.
Just like in gastronomy
“We lost about 50,000 jobs across the industry in 2019/2020,” Axthelm said. That corresponds to about a third of the jobs. “It’s now our heavy backpack that we carry around with us. It’s a bit like the catering industry. Once you’ve left and found a new job, I can’t snap my fingers and they’ll come back.” In addition, each of the former employees “probably told ten people during this forced departure from the industry how bad it all is, that he lost his job, so that we now have to rebuild the trust that politics brought to us”.
The consequence, according to Axthelm, is: “As an industry, we have to learn that we make ourselves more visible – and you can no longer simply say that we will find people from our own workforce through word-of-mouth propaganda.”
For example, the wind industry has been working together with the energy company Leag in Lusatia for around a year on a publicly funded project: “It’s about defining what job profiles they have and what job profiles we will need in the future,” said Axthelm. “We often hear that the energy turnaround will bring an increase in employment overall, but that’s no use to anyone in Lusatia. They want to know how do I personally have prospects. We said that we as an industry have to do more for ourselves responsibility to give the people in their home region a perspective.”
The wind industry sees great potential in the automotive industry. There are many “people who no longer have any real employment in the automotive supplier sector due to the shift to e-mobility, but they could stay in their own company in the wind sector,” said Axthelm.
