A portal of opportunity for new energy talent

Our prediction is that there's going to be a massive shortfall in talent for the next decade.

The speaker is Kristian Gjerl?v-Juel , Director of Renewable Energy Trading & Optimisation for Centrica Energy in Denmark. He’d met our CEO, Jakob Bloch, at his Aalborg office to be interviewed for our series of podcasts with commodity trading leaders.

In Kristian’s view the global energy industry is massively short of talent due in part to the emergence of more and more businesses entering the market. Plus, he points out, there’s the impact of big companies changing their profiles, as illustrated most clearly by the way in which oil majors have been switching away from fossil fuels into the new electric economy. It means strong competition to attract and retain every talented person who’s either already in the industry or is interested to join it.

Rather than just reacting to all this, to mitigate the risk of attrition we have built our own talent pipeline. We recruit people while they’re still at university and offer them the opportunity of a portal into the industry.

Out of 420 people working here currently, 81 are student workers. I realise that’s a large proportion of our total staff. Our rationale behind bringing in so many student workers is that it needs numbers to build an effective pipeline for future recruitment.

We invest in these employees. I'm not talking about having them do unskilled tasks like pick up coffee or fetch the newspaper. They’re put into live testing so they participate in the operations of the company. It means they develop skills that they can use with us going forward.

“Statistically, we end up recruiting around two-thirds of our student workers into permanent positions. If they're not so lucky, or if we're not so lucky that this turns into a permanent employment with us, then at least they can go back into the labour market and apply their skills elsewhere. This therefore turns into their first real full-time job in the industry. As I see it, this is a win-win. We have bench depth in our organisation and they have a springboard into a magnificent world.”

When Jakob asked Kristian for a bit more detail about the portal programme, he reported that recruiting typically starts with undergraduates who are two or three years into their time at university and who are invited to spend 10-20 hours at the company every week. They tend to be a mixed bunch in the sense of having been recruited from several different faculties. Many are studying engineering or physics, others may come from the business school. Reflecting the universities themselves, intakes also represent a wide diversity of nationalities. The present assortment of portal students at Centrica Energy Trading in fact comprises people from 36 countries!

But we can see that our intake of student employees doesn’t hit the diversity numbers of the university’s overall intake. We run a collaboration with Aalborg University where the proportion of female students entering the engineering school, for example, approaches 50%. For us at present it’s only 25%. I see it as a potential that we are working hard to tap into.

We can only attract those who are interested in our organisation. Therefore we’re very focused on being visible and present at an early stage. At university level it’s important to us that there’s an awareness both of the industry in general and of our own organisation in particular. That awareness needs to be strongest in the fields where we see a match between the faculty, the scholars when they finish training there and what we need in terms of capability.

It is already proving to be a strong starting point, in a programme that represents a massive investment in a talent factory. Not all of the candidates will eventually be hired on a permanent basis, of course, but a large proportion of them will end up building at least part of their career at the company - helping to fill the global talent gap that confronts the whole energy sector.