Global Energy Employment Hit 76 Million in 2024, but Training Systems Are Falling Behind, IEA Finds

Global energy sector employment reached 76 million people in 2024, up 5.4 million since 2019, according to the World Energy Employment 2025 report from the International Energy Agency. Jobs in the sector grew 2.2% that year, nearly double the growth rate of the wider global economy. Most of that growth came from electricity, which overtook fuel supply as the largest energy employer for the first time, driven mainly by solar PV.

The expansion is not evenly spread. IEA data for 2024 show energy employment growing fastest in India, at 5.8%, followed by Indonesia at 4.8% and the Middle East at 3.5%. China's energy workforce grew 2.2%, roughly matching the global average, while employment in advanced economies rose just 0.4%. Electric vehicle manufacturing alone added nearly 800,000 jobs worldwide in 2024; in China, almost 40% of all vehicle-manufacturing jobs are now tied to EVs and their batteries, according to the same IEA report.

A separate count from the International Renewable Energy Agency and International Labour Organization, published in January 2026, puts renewable energy employment specifically at 16.6 million jobs in 2024, up 2.3% from the year before. China accounted for 7.3 million of those jobs, or 44% of the global total — down from 7.4 million and a 46% share in 2023, as layoffs at solar PV manufacturers offset growth elsewhere in the country's renewable sector. The European Union held 1.8 million renewable energy jobs, essentially unchanged from 2023; Brazil had 1.4 million; India and the United States each had roughly 1.1 to 1.3 million.

Hiring is outpacing the supply of trained workers

The growth numbers mask a harder problem underneath. A June 2026 report from the IEA, Ensuring a Skilled Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Workforce, warns that hiring is outpacing the supply of trained workers in applied technical roles: electricians, pipefitters, line workers, plant operators and nuclear engineers. A separate IEA survey of more than 700 energy-related companies, unions and training institutions found that over half of respondents reported critical hiring bottlenecks, according to the agency's 2026 employment findings. Those same occupations have added 2.5 million positions globally since 2019, the IEA says.

To keep the gap from widening, the IEA estimates the number of new qualified entrants into the energy sector would need to rise by around 40% globally by 2030, at an additional cost of roughly $2.6 billion a year — a figure the agency notes is under 0.1% of current global education spending. The pressure is compounded by an ageing workforce: in advanced economies, there are 2.4 energy workers within ten years of retirement for every worker under the age of 25. The imbalance is sharpest in nuclear power and grid operations, where the ratio of workers nearing retirement to new entrants stands at 1.7 to 1 and 1.4 to 1 respectively.

What is slowing training down

The IEA report, produced with input from two workshops co-organised with the European Commission, identifies three recurring barriers across the countries it surveyed: the relatively low attractiveness of energy careers compared with other technical sectors, limited availability and accessibility of training programmes, and a mismatch between energy policy targets and workforce planning. In practical terms, that means solar and wind capacity is often approved and funded faster than the technical colleges, apprenticeships or certification schemes needed to staff it.

The IRENA-ILO review points to a related, narrower gap: women and people with disabilities remain underrepresented in renewable energy training and hiring pipelines, which the report frames as both an equity issue and an untapped source of labour supply at a moment when employers cannot fill technical roles fast enough. Neither report treats the shortage as a single-country problem — the IEA explicitly frames workforce planning as something national governments, employers and training providers need to coordinate on together, since a shortfall in one part of a supply chain (say, grid technicians) can stall projects that depend on it regardless of how much capital is available.

Why it matters beyond hiring numbers

Neither the IEA nor IRENA and the ILO frame this as a temporary bottleneck. Renewable capacity additions are on a multi-year trajectory that assumes a workforce to match them, and the IEA's own modelling treats the training shortfall as a variable that could slow deployment on its own, separate from financing or supply chains. For education and training systems, the practical question the reports raise is less about whether to add capacity in electrician and technician programmes, and more about how quickly certification and apprenticeship pipelines in each country can be scaled to match project timelines that are already set.