Renewable energy and related industries have been one of the world’s most dynamic job creation engines in the last decade and are expected to grow even faster in the coming years. Driven by climate targets, steadily declining technology costs, rising investment, and growing concerns about energy sovereignty, the sector is expanding much faster than the labour markets that feed it. According to estimates from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the global renewable energy workforce climbed to 16.2 million people in 2023, up 18% from the previous year (IRENA and ILO, 2024). Under a pathway compatible with the Paris Agreement goal to keep global temperature rise within 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C), the Agency estimates that employment could reach around 30 million jobs by 2030 – more than double today’s level (Figure 1) – and around 40 million by 2050 (IRENA, 2024a)
These opportunities extend across the entire renewable value chain, but also across other industries related to the energy transition. IRENA estimates that sectors such as energy efficiency could reach 50 million jobs by 2030, and jobs in flexibility almost 27 million by the same year, encompassing both large utility-scale projects and decentralised solutions such as mini-grids, rooftop photovoltaics (PV) and clean cooking technologies (IRENA, 2024a). The demand for employees is growing across the renewable energy value chain, from upstream planning and material procurement to component manufacturing, project development, construction, installation, grid integration, operations and maintenance, and end-of-life recycling. Renewable energy offers many entry points for workers of many educational backgrounds, from high-skilled roles (engineers, data scientists, finance and policy specialists), to medium-skilled trades (electricians, welders, tower climbers, solar installers), to more administrative roles.
IRENA has analysed and mapped these requirements for selected technologies (Figure 2). With the rapid expansion of renewable energy and the transition away from fossil fuels, skill demand is outpacing supply (LinkedIn, 2024). IRENA’s work has been highlighting for over a decade that educational misalignments and persistent labour and skills shortages are increasing and are likely to become more widespread unless pro-active measures are taken. There is already evidence showing that organisations trying to hire skilled workers struggle to find qualified applicants for nearly every occupation, with installation and repair technicians topping the list. For example, the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board’s (ECITB) workforce census report revealed that in 2024, 81% of renewable energy employers in the engineering construction industry (ECI) were experiencing challenges hiring workers, compared to 71% in the wider ECI in the United Kingdom (Fantini and de Leon, 2024). This is even more acute when trying to recruit women, as this study highlights in the following sections.
Addressing the skills shortage gap requires a deep understanding of labour market dynamics, long-term commitments and a strong talent development strategy that anticipates workforce challenges. These strategies need to be holistic and multi-level, ranging from modernising university programmes that integrate renewable energy considerations and ensuring vocational and technical education aligned with industry certification standards, to creating dual training and apprenticeship models that blend classroom learning with hands-on experience and provide continuous professional upskilling and reskilling, especially for workers transitioning from fossil fuel sectors (IRENA and ILO, 2024).
Additionally, social dialogue and workers’ and citizen engagement is crucial to bring employees and communities together, particularly since evidence shows that, in some cases, workers themselves display little enthusiasm for roles labelled as “green jobs” (IDRIC, 2025). IIn least-developed markets, additional considerations need to be taken into account, such as recognising informal jobs, ensuring proper access to training programmes, and enabling on-the-job learning pathways, which are often the entry point for young individuals. But all these strategies will fail if the talent pool is restricted to men. Efforts need to be put in place to ensure that under-represented individuals (which includes women, youth, Indigenous people, persons with disabilities and other marginalised communities) are also part of the skilling efforts so they have a chance to be the workforce of the future. By broadening and diversifying the talent pipeline today, governments, industry, and education providers can ensure that renewable energy not only powers the planet but also is the engine of equitable and lasting prosperity for millions of people worldwide.
As countries ramp up investments in clean technologies, and as associated jobs continue to grow, there is a unique opportunity to redesign energy systems to be more diverse, inclusive and fair. However, this requires intentional strategies based on high-quality data that ground the complex dynamics and that identify emerging and persistent structural barriers in sectors undergoing rapid transformation, such as energy. Data collection may not by itself trigger action but serves as the foundation for evidence-based policy making and is needed for tracking progress and assessing the true impact of these policies. Consistent and comprehensive data are not just useful, they are indispensable. Historically, data collection in the energy sector has focused primarily on capacity and generation metrics, overlooking emerging challenges and their social impacts. IRENA has taken a leading role in moving beyond measuring gigawatts by also examining employment figures and the participation of under-represented groups, namely women, in the energy workforce. Without robust gender-disaggregated data, efforts to build inclusive energy systems risk failing or being misguided from the get-go. This section aims to address the persistent gap in gender-disaggregated data by presenting findings from a global survey designed to examine women’s participation in the renewable energy sector. The survey, an update to IRENA’s groundbreaking 2019 study, collects both quantitative and qualitative data from individuals and organisations worldwide (Box 1).
It provides a deeper, updated view of gender4 dynamics in the sector, offering insights into employment patterns, role distribution and organisational characteristics based on the responses collected after conducting a statistical analysis. This evidence forms the basis for targeted recommendations that support greater gender equity in the clean energy.Women’s share in the renewable energy workforce, globally and by region IRENA’s 2019 flagship analysis of workforce diversity, focused specifically on gender, found that while the renewable energy sector performs better than the broader energy industry, women remain under-represented – with their contributions under-recognised – and far from achieving equal participation (IRENA, 2019). Despite IRENA’s advocacy efforts since the first analysis, the new study shows that women continue to be under-represented in the renewable energy workforce. The new global survey results show that women still remain at the mark of 32% of full-time positions in the renewable energy sector.6 Renewable energy holds significant promise, and women are better represented in its workforce compared to the traditional oil and gas sector – where female participation was estimated at 23% as of 2023 (Hughes Plummer et al., 2023) – or the nuclear sector, where it stood at 24.9% (NEA, 2023). However, female participation in renewables is still far from the global average for women in the overall economy, estimated at 43.4% in 2024 workforce.
