This article was written by FUSE Executive Fellow Nathan Chai
The current energy and infrastructure transition in the United States might seem incremental—even slow. But considering the breadth of plans emerging from cities across the country, the work ahead represents an incredible shift. According to the NRDC, “Achieving net zero by 2050 [a goal in line with many city and regional energy plans] will require generating 84 to 95 percent of the U.S. energy supply from renewable sources.”
Making such a massive change requires an equally significant shift in our skilled workforce. Unfortunately, in many cities, the opposite is happening: a high percentage of our workforce is nearing retirement, while fewer new entrants are coming in. This context is why, in 2023, LinkedIn noted that addressing the clean energy labor challenge “will require unprecedented levels of cooperation among stakeholders in the public and private sectors.”
So what do we do? In Salt Lake City, we’re creating the SL-CLEAR plan to provide an analysis of some of the highest-impact pollution reduction measures that can be pursued in the coming years in the region. To support these measures, I had the unique opportunity to join the team as a FUSE Executive Fellow, focused on workforce development strategy for the region’s clean energy workers. My role included mapping the critical jobs we’ll need, forecasting labor growth and potential gaps, and identifying ways to improve accessibility and awareness of these fast-growing jobs across our communities.
In building this workforce development strategy, we identified a few significant challenges:
- Understanding the current state of key jobs and industries in the Salt Lake region. What occupations are most critical, fastest-growing, and most at risk?
- Creating detailed profiles of the community members we aim to serve. We needed to understand both the barriers and the opportunities they face. This clarity would provide the foundation for an equitable, community-driven engagement strategy.
- Building a shared vision among employers and institutions. Many of the occupations essential to Salt Lake City’s clean energy goals are already among our fastest-growing jobs, and employers struggle to find and retain qualified workers. Because the SL-CLEAR plan will add even more demand for key jobs, collaboration across government, industry, education, and community partners is critical. No single institution can solve this challenge alone.
To address the first challenge—understanding our key jobs and trends—I spoke with dozens of representatives from various industries, leading training organizations, and programs across the country. I also dove deep into labor data and regional occupational trends. What we found was clear:
- Regarding workforce size, the occupations we’ll need most are skilled trades roles—electricians, HVAC technicians, construction laborers, front-line managers with relevant certifications, and other related roles.
- These occupations are growing several times faster in the Salt Lake region than the national average for overall job growth.
- Across nearly all of them, we’re failing to train enough workers in our region to keep pace with the incredible industry growth and pace of retirements.
In short, the occupations needed to support SL-CLEAR are among the region’s fastest-growing and are already in short supply. Building a focused workforce development strategy for these roles will be essential to success.
Building Around Real Needs, Not Assumptions
Addressing this challenge is as much a recruiting problem as a training one. To meet the scale of growth we foresee, we’ll need to expand awareness of and access to these jobs among a much broader range of community members. That’s where the idea for our first innovation lab came from. We didn’t want to start designing programs without hearing directly from the people such programs would serve.
To spark interest and accessibility for the lab, we hosted the workshop with an open invitation—held at a family-friendly hour, on the city’s west side, with dinner provided. We focused on key questions such as:
- How much do people already know about these jobs?
- Does the idea of “green” or “clean energy” jobs affect their level of interest?
- What barriers or concerns are most important to solve?
- What influences most strongly affect someone’s decision to pursue a new career in one of these high-demand fields?
The innovation lab proved to be a success. With a room full of partners and community members, we dove in for over three hours. Some of the answers surprised me, including a degree of skepticism about branding jobs as “clean energy” or “green.” For many, those impacts felt secondary—a “luxury” concern compared to the more immediate questions of job stability, training pathways, and access to trusted, local career advice. The lessons we learned in that lab will inform future program design and outreach messaging.
From Community Insights to Shared Alignment
While this first innovation lab deepened our understanding of community attitudes and opportunities, we knew that to bring a program to life, we’d also need to address the challenge of shared vision and collaboration among partners. So, in the second year of my fellowship, we designed a follow-up innovation lab focused on convening key training providers, government institutions, and industry representatives. Our goals included building a shared understanding of the workforce landscape, articulating common development goals, identifying assets each partner could contribute, and outlining next steps and potential investments.
Like the first lab, this one was well attended, with over 30 leaders from organizations such as the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, the Utah Department of Energy, Salt Lake Community College, and the Salt Lake City School District.
A few themes stood out:
- In a post-event survey, participants expressed strong interest in building on the lab’s momentum through more regular convenings. Most agreed that connections like the ones made during the lab would be critical to fostering a stronger network and pursuing joint funding and program opportunities.
- At the same time, we identified several barriers that will need to be addressed, including organizational silos, dramatic shifts in funding structure, and regulatory constraints. The innovation lab was a start, but we’d need more collaboration and alignment before building new programs.
Together, these two FUSE innovation labs have laid the groundwork for a new chapter in regional workforce development. By combining community insight with cross-sector collaboration, we’ve worked to build the relationships and shared understanding needed to launch future programs that connect residents to high-growth, high-wage careers. These new partnerships—for example, with the NSF Engine in the Southwest and several different state workforce and energy departments—will help us build new pathways to training, credentials, and upward mobility, ensuring that Salt Lake City’s clean energy vision is powered by a strong and skilled workforce, sustained by accessible job pathways that help provide important upward mobility for community members across the region.
