Energy industry employers indicated they most value team players and self-starters who can think critically, solve problems, work independently and follow protocols and standards, work safely and want to work outdoors.
The four workforce categories reflect the demand driven by “a massive build-out of electric infrastructure,” Ken Walz reported at the 2026 Advanced Technological Education Principal Investigators’ Conference in Washington, D.C.
As director and principal investigator of the CREATE Energy Center for the past two decades, Walz has used funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program to provide professional development that helps community and technical college educators and high school teachers respond to energy industry workforce trends.
CREATE has surveyed energy industry employers and educators every four to five years since 2008. The center is based at Madison Area Technical College in Wisconsin, where Walz is a science and engineering instructor. This year, 134 energy stakeholders — from industry and academia — responded to the survey questions.
“When technology is changing really fast, it’s especially important to survey your industry folks frequently,” Walz said, noting the center tries to do the survey every five years. “Every time we’ve done it, we’ve seen little shifts and changes, technologies that are emerging, technologies that are becoming more mature. Not that they disappear, but maybe the workforce is now fully staffed and there’s not a need for new people.”
During his conference presentation about the survey, Walz asked if anyone remembered the burst in demand for biodiesel technicians in the early 2010s. CREATE last offered biodiesel workshops in 2015.
The survey will inform the programming that CREATE offers in the next five years, Walz said, noting that energy storage is in demand; artificial intelligence along with solar photovoltaic and electric vehicles are in the second tier of demand; while drones and nuclear are the third tier of technology categories with increasing demand in this survey.
CREATE provides stipends, travel support and funding for classroom lab equipment for faculty who attend its in-person summer workshops. CREATE also offers a wide array of virtual professional development and online instructional resources.
Kevin Cooper, a survey co-author with Walz and Andy McMahan, thinks infrastructure-driven demand for technicians tied to data center construction — and, by extension, the growing use of artificial intelligence — may endure longer than other trends. Cooper referred to this demand as CapEx, for capital expenditures that companies spend on buildings and equipment.
Over the past two decades, energy-sector job demand has shifted from large utility-scale and power plant positions to smaller-scale renewable energy projects, particularly solar, Cooper said. That transition has increased demand for roles such as rooftop installers, assemblers, and maintenance workers, a trend reflected in workforce survey data.
“A lot of the [current] jobs are in that CapEx space, which is the building of data centers, the building of high voltage lines, the building of energy storage,” he said, noting that many of the companies constructing data centers have plans to continue building facilities in phases for years.
Cooper said demand is growing for workers in energy-related fields, particularly non-destructive testing, with opportunities linked to emerging and traditional industries such as fusion energy, nuclear power, cement, ceramics and pipeline infrastructure. He recently retired from Indian River State College (Florida), where he was an academic administrator for 17 years and principal investigator of the ATE-funded Regional Center for Nuclear Education & Training.
McMahon, the other survey co-author, is the director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Technology Center (EARTh) at Central Carolina Community College. In North Carolina.
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