This comprehensive 46-page report offers human resources professionals and hiring executives unique insight into emerging Smart Grid human resources challenges, solutions and trends. Featuring 76 unique tables and graphs illustrating nearly 30 distinct hiring topics, this research arms industry professionals with a powerful benchmarking tool that will ensure the development of a successful Smart Grid human capital strategy.

Smart Grid candidates and members of academia can also leverage this report to pinpoint the exacting qualification requirements of this growing sector, facilitating a candidate’s pursuit of the most desired skills, degrees and training, as well as an educational organization’s development of curricula targeted to produce the most employable graduates.

Please download the Executive Summary to view the full table of contents of the report.

Executive Summary

The Smart Grid job market continues to show signs of growth, with hiring managers reporting a projected 9% increase in hiring activity over 2012. This figure may be conservative, however, as respondents anticipated a 38% decrease in 2012, yet reported a 26% overall increase in this year’s study. While Smart Grid hiring managers forecasted the rate of job growth to slow in 2013, hiring will far surpass the national average of nearly 2%.

Hiring managers continue to face significant hiring challenges attracting both inexperienced and experienced hires, yet seem unwilling to make any compromises in the area of qualification requirements, including desired degrees, additional certifications and experience levels. While hiring bonuses have increased substantially, salaries have remained relatively flat. Coupled with laggard growth in domestic graduates obtaining the desired degrees, an unfavorable immigration policy barring the retention of qualified foreign graduates, an expected attrition rate of power industry engineers in the 50% range over the next five years and a corresponding generational shift in the workforce, hiring managers are struggling to fill open roles expeditiously. Respondents also reported a slightly larger reliance on experienced candidates over inexperienced candidates in 2013, compounding problems by increasing the overall cost of talent acquisition.

In response to these challenges, respondents in 2013 indicated that they are proactively addressing the issues by networking with industry organizations to share best practices, establishing knowledge transfer initiatives in anticipation of massive future retirements, exploring more flexible work arrangements, offering relocation packages to attract talent outside of their geography, looking outside the industry to recruit candidates with transferable skill sets and aggressively pursuing available visa sponsorships.

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