Today’s employer advice is from Kenny Okoye, Managing Director at Bavana Partners.
Q: Tell us about your organization.
Bavana Partners is a leading professional services firm that offers executive search and selection, as well as permanent and interim recruitment solutions to global energy organisations.
Our working relationships with senior industry executives, augmented by local research teams across the world deliver a truly global solution to our clients, with successful placements in over 30 countries.
Our success is built on our consultants’ unparalleled experience working within and understanding their niche market areas.
Q: What advice would you give to people in midlife who want to transition to a green job?
It’s a very exciting time in the renewables sector right now, the industry is growing rapidly and there is huge demand for talent. It is very competitive in the market for individuals with renewables experience and now more than ever more companies are looking out of the industry for talent to meet the shortfall.
There is need for candidates with an educational background in the STEM fields but candidates from industries with transferable skills such as real estate, power generation and delivery, heavy civil project construction, software etc should really start considering making a switch to the industry.
However, it would still be advantageous to develop skills beforehand in the kinds of software used in the renewables sector such as PVsyst, Helioscope, Power BI etc.
Q: What are the skills that you believe will be required most in the short-medium term in your industry?
As the industry moves more towards automation and web-based tools supporting design, development and management of assets, experience with software like Javascript, .NET or Java and AWS, Azure Cloud Services or other cloud-based experience are highly valuable skills.
In addition to software professionals as mentioned above there is certainly a need for engineering talent, sales, construction management etc.