ORE Catapult Report Maps Offshore Wind Skills Needs Up to 94,000 Jobs

ORE Catapult has published a detailed assessment of offshore wind skills needs, setting out a pathway to grow the UK’s offshore wind workforce to between 75,000 and 94,000 people by 2030, more than double the current headcount, and a target the report says cannot be met without immediate structural change to how the sector trains and recruits.

Mapping Offshore Wind Skills Needs to 2030

The report, titled ‘Workforce Foresighting for Offshore Wind 2030–2035’, consolidates five studies conducted between 2023 and 2025. Its purpose is to identify the skills required to support emerging technologies and to make the case for shifting from a ‘lagging’ training model (one that reacts to demand after it materialises) to a ‘leading’ approach that anticipates what the sector will need before the gap opens. ORE Catapult identifies wind turbine technicians, high voltage cable specialists, installation engineers and fabrication specialists as the roles most critical to sector growth.

The baseline figures are worth scrutinising. The report, as summarised by ORE Catapult, describes the current offshore wind workforce as approximately 40,000. However, ORE Catapult’s own press release puts that figure at 32,000, with a forecast of over 100,000 people employed by 2030, a higher ceiling than the 75,000–94,000 range cited in the body of the report. The difference is not explained in the published materials, and facilities managers or investors building business cases around workforce supply projections would do well to note the inconsistency before relying on either figure.

The report was sponsored by RenewableUK, which represents more than 500 companies in the UK renewable energy sector. RenewableUK’s own analysis sets out a complementary picture: to meet minimum government targets, 75,000 workers will be needed in offshore wind by 2030, alongside some 19,000 in onshore wind. That gives a combined renewables workforce requirement of close to 95,000 people in wind energy alone, on top of whichever baseline you choose to start from.

A Sector Racing Against Its Own Recruitment Pipeline

The stakes are concrete. The report links the workforce expansion directly to the UK government’s ambition to deploy 43–50GW of offshore wind by 2030, a target that underpins the clean power strategy. Without the people to build, install and maintain that capacity, the gigawatts do not materialise. Danielle Portsmouth, future skills manager at ORE Catapult, put it plainly: ‘Without immediate action, the capabilities and capacity of our current workforce will be insufficient to achieve the UK’s 2030 targets in offshore wind.’

Portsmouth also framed the competitive context. ‘The UK is a global leader in offshore wind experience and installed capacity, attracting significant investment and playing a crucial role in the nation’s clean energy transition. However, without a clear focus on increasing the pipeline of skills and talent into the sector, we will not be able to maintain this position.’

James Lord, skills and social value manager at RenewableUK, echoed the urgency. ‘This report identifies a series of vital measures which will enable us to fill specific key roles with staff who have appropriate levels of expertise and experience to achieve this, creating tens of thousands of high-quality well-paid jobs throughout the UK,’ he said. ‘It also highlights the fact that there’s no time to lose, we need to take action now so that the capabilities and capacity of our workforce will be sufficient to build the vast pipeline of projects.’

The pace of projected growth puts the scale of the problem into sharper relief. According to Taylor Hopkinson, the number of people in direct and indirect offshore wind jobs is set to rise from 26,000 currently to 69,000 by 2026. If that trajectory is correct, the sector would need to nearly double again in the four years that follow just to clear the minimum 2030 threshold, an acceleration that makes the ‘leading’ training model the report advocates look less like a policy preference and more like a basic operational requirement.

The report concludes that meeting offshore wind ambitions will require a more flexible skills ecosystem alongside investment and technology. The ‘Workforce Foresighting for Offshore Wind 2030–2035’ document is now publicly available, giving supply chain operators, training providers and procurement teams the detailed role mapping they need to plan hiring and apprenticeship pipelines ahead of the deployment ramp.