Are Under-skilled Teams Putting The Energy Transition in Jeopardy?

This article is the second in a series explaining how Generation Solar came to be, and how our approach to training your team is different. If you’d like to read the first article, which details the journey our founder, Taylor took from COO of a major national EPC and developer to consultant and ultimately, to the problem of solar training, check it out here.

In this article we review the reasons why solar companies aren’t investing more in training, how that’s putting the energy transition in jeopardy, and why we think we can change that with training that actually targets solar-targeted business skills. In a series of articles to follow over the coming weeks, we’ll introduce the “Seven Deadly Sins of Professional Training,” and how we’re working to avoid committing each of them. But let’s begin by understanding how we ended up here. Why are solar teams still learning everything the hard way?

Industry Growth Has Led to Under-skilled Teams

The solar industry has more than doubled its employee count in the last decade, with much more dramatic growth among certain role types.

The growth is likely to continue for at least a few more decades, and the problem of under-skilled teams with it. To understand why this is, we must look inside company dynamics.

First, in growing industries there are far more inexperienced people to train than experienced people to train them. Companies can’t rely on informal on-the-job training when hiring someone with the right amount of experience is often not an option.  Many companies ratio of “old hands” to “new hires” is nowhere close to normal.

This leads to issue two: Senior team members are often under huge amounts of pressure to execute, leaving them little time for their own professional development, much less mentoring others.

Third, inexperienced team members are pushed into positions of decision making, for better or worse, sooner than they’re ready. A side effect of this shove into the spotlight is over-specialization. If you know you have to take on a senior PM role soon, why would you spend time learning the basics of business development or engineering? But inexperienced, over-specialized team members cause more errors, of greater consequence. Most of them will eventually learn from the mistakes, but that’s a rough road to success, and responsible for a lot of burnout and career switching just as they’re starting to find their footing, feeding back to problem.

As renewable uptake surges throughout the next couple of decades, all of these challenges will only grow. 

Leaders don’t believe that training can solve business problems.

We believe there is a substitute for experience.  (Actually, there are many different substitutes for many different types of experience, but more on that later). Providing teams with better training and support can allow them to bypass years of painful real world lessons. But our industry is choosing not to invest in better training.  Instead, companies are choosing to lose much more money (as well as time, reputation, and peace of mind) when team members inevitably make unnecessary and extremely expensive mistakes. Why?

It’s understandable that many leaders assume that training programs aren’t worth prioritizing.  Many programs aren’t.  In the next article in this series, we’ll review seven mistakes that most training programs make.  Together, the issues we cover have given training a bad rap among company leaders, who tend to think of training investment as “something that will definitely cost time and money now and might or might not pay off in the future.” 

Why Inadequate Training Puts the Energy transition in Jeopardy

We have momentum, but the energy transition is not fated. If we want to become the 21st century’s source of energy, we need to develop 21st century training.

How many solar farms will catch on fire before siting new projects becomes impossible?

How many blackouts blamed on renewables intermittency before regulators drop the hammer on interconnection?

How long will residential clients accept solar that costs twice as much as elsewhere in the world?

How many times can we be outmaneuvered politically, locally, state, and federal, before we stick together on what counts?

The solar industry is succeeding despite itself. As renewables become synonymous with “power",” we won’t be able to afford to make as many mistakes.

At Generation Solar, we believe that for most companies, training is the absolute best tool for solving critical solar business problems, and offers the best return on any potential investment.  Further, we think that failing to have a system for training the next generation of solar leaders puts the entire future of the global energy transition in jeopardy. Despite unbelievable business opportunities, the solar industry has been stalling in recent years, unable to adapt quickly enough to the challenges of regulatory changes, trade wars, and a virtual first business context. The pace of change will only increase as renewables begin to take over the grid.

The chaos of the last few years is nothing compared to what’s in store as we work to revolutionize hundred year old systems for transportation and electricity built entirely around fossil-fuels. We can complain about the changes impacting our businesses, or we can build a team of nimble solar all-stars who can help find a way forward, no matter what the business context looks like.

At the end of the day, people grow companies.  If we invest in people, companies grow faster, stronger, and with more stability. But like any investment, it’s important that investments in training are strategic. Some of you know that Generation Solar has spent much of the last year diving into the latest research on the psychology of learning, analyzing lessons from our consulting and executive experiences, and experimenting with our clients to develop a new type of training that truly works for solar teams. 

Is our training system perfect?  No. (And it never will be).  Is our system better than making an under-trained employee responsible for multi-million dollar deals and then putting out fires while they “learn from experience?”  100%, absolutely, yes. 

Is it also better than the typical training approach?  We think so, and our clients seem to agree.  Traditional training is necessary, but nowhere close to sufficient for training the next generation of solar professionals.

In the next parts of our series, we’ll review what we see as the problem with legacy training systems.

TL;DR: Compared to the status quo, our training system is much more individualized, broader in scope, and focused on actively training judgment and skills instead of simply providing information.

But before we dive into what that really means, we need to lay out the the problems of the status quo. 

In the next article, I’ll lay out seven problems we’ve identified with solar training programs. In the following articles in this series, I’ll pick them apart one by one, explaining how we’re chipping away at these obstacles to success.