Five Studies, One Signal: What a Meta-Study Reveals About Offshore Wind's Workforce Challenge

In my last post I shared two new workforce foresighting studies, carried out with the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult - one covering hybrid energy integration and the other looking at autonomous subsea survey. For the analysis I cover here, we took a step back to ask a different question: What happens when we look at workforce foresighting not topic-by-topic, but across multiple topics?

The resulting report, Workforce Foresighting for Offshore Wind 2030–2035, co-authored by us with Danielle Portsmouth and published by ORE Catapult, consolidates findings from five foresighting studies conducted between 2023 and 2025. Three of these topics derived from the UK's Offshore Wind Industrial Growth Plan (OWIGP); the other two studies pre-dated the plan's publication but also cover technologies included in the OWIGP. Altogether the five studies covered were:

• Dynamic cable systems in floating offshore wind;

• Robotic and autonomous systems for use in operations and maintenance;

• Automated welding for flotation structures;

• Advancing manufacture of wind turbine blades; and

• UK production of high-voltage direct current cable systems.

Add in the two studies I shared last week and the volume of work behind this programme becomes hard to ignore: Dozens of workshops, hundreds of contributions from industry, education and research, and a growing set of new organisational capabilities and role profiles.

The headline figure is stark enough on its own. The UK's offshore wind workforce currently stands at around 40,000 people. To meet the government's Clean Power 2030 targets, that needs to grow to somewhere between 75,000 and 94,000 workers by the end of the decade. But as the report is careful to point out, this isn't primarily a recruitment problem. It's a capability problem, and those are different challenges to solve.

From lagging to leading

Most workforce planning reacts to shortages that have already appeared. Workforce foresighting begins with an alternative approach: Looking ahead at emerging technologies and seeking to identify organisational capabilities that don't yet exist at scale. The intention is to move the capability and skills development to a 'leading' rather than 'lagging' perspective. That said, the timeline pressure is here and now. The full cycle of developing content, recruiting learners, retraining the existing workforce and giving new entrants time to build on-the-job experience is something like five years - the UK is already late in creating the 2030 workforce.

Role archetypes: the idea that makes this manageable

Across five studies, the number of new organisational capabilities (287) and occupational profiles (77) identified is large enough that treating each one as a brand new job description would be unworkable for both employers and educators. The answer we developed to make this accessible is the concept of "Role Archetypes". These are occupational disciplines such as electrical engineer, mechanical technician; onto which new, technology-specific capabilities can be layered as they emerge. Rather than inventing a qualification for every new role profile that foresighting suggests, the archetypes let educators and industry start from a familiar foundation and layer relevant new capabilities on top. We think this is a genuinely useful route into causing practical change from the rigorous foresighting process. We expect to see it used well beyond this particular report.

We adapted the process of identifying the archetypes from qualitative research methodology (iterative coding). In an initial inductive pass, all future occupational profiles and their associated capabilities were reviewed and grouped, with the objective of identifying the minimum viable set of archetypes needed to accommodate the data. A second pass then applied a constant comparative approach: each profile was tested against the emerging set of archetypes and assigned to its closest fit, with similar archetypes merged where appropriate. If a profile genuinely did not fit within the existing set, a new archetype was created. This process was repeated until every profile was assigned and the archetype set was stable - the 77 original occupational profiles mapped to thirteen role archetypes.

Emerging themes across the five studies

Looking across all five studies together also surfaces patterns that no single study would reveal on its own. Underlying shifts show up regardless of which specific technology a given study was examining: Towards digital and data fluency, automation reducing reliance on scarce specialist trades, 'whole system' thinking, where regulatory and governance capability keeps pace with new technology. The repetition matters - these aren't quirks of any one supply chain, but structural shifts the whole sector needs to plan around. These 'emerging themes' provide another way to make sense of the larger data set.

What this means in practice

Through each workforce foresighting study, we set out a clear set of next steps - generally, to establish joint working groups bringing together education and industry; identifying a lead or champion for each technology area; and developing an open-access tool giving educators and employers direct access to the data in a usable form. However it is not easy to bring this together, particularly where companies may be cautious about sharing advances in new technology applications. None of this happens automatically and it requires the same kind of convening, facilitation and follow-through that produced the underlying studies in the first place. However, the role archetypes and emerging themes have received positive feedback from a number of cross-industry forums, so we hope these will make the work and next steps more approachable going forwards.

Where this goes next

Two things follow from this work that I'll return to over the coming weeks. First, along with ORE Catapult (and sponsored by InnovateUK) we are currently exploring a leaner version of the workforce foresighting process, with more grounding in the current state, a reduced burden on the participants and a greater bias towards outcomes.

Secondly: I believe the approach of foresighting - trying to ensure the workforce is ready to adopt new technologies - is fractal. We have demonstrated application at a sector level. We can also apply the meta-analysis, archetypes and themes across multiple sectors, or portfolios of technologies. In the other direction, I also get asked if this thinking is valuable at the scale of a single company or product line, rather than a whole sector. With some help from Matt Short, we have been developing a lightweight version of this process designed for exactly that purpose.

In summary, if the individual foresighting studies told us what future roles might look like, the meta-study begins to show us how to organise and act on that picture at scale. It's an important shift, but it's still only part of the answer. I'll return in future posts to the three topics above.

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Link to ORE Catapult's announcement about the report: https://ore.catapult.org.uk/media-centre/press-releases/new-research-offers-a-route-to-double-the-uk-offshore-wind-workforce-by-2030-through-innovation

Link to the report (pdf direct link): https://ore.catapult.org.uk/resource-hub/analysis-reports/workforce-foresighting-for-offshore-wind-2030-2035