India’s renewable energy ambitions are measured in gigawatts. The country wants 500GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030, and investment in solar parks, wind farms and transmission infrastructure continues to accelerate.
What receives far less attention is the workforce required to build all of it.
Green Power International (GPI), an engineering, procurement and construction company working across renewable energy and oil and gas projects, has encountered that constraint directly.
“Getting skilled talent is becoming more challenging because the energy sector is a very niche segment,” says Sandeep Das, the company’s chief human resources officer.
The shortage is structural rather than cyclical. Renewable energy projects require engineers who understand electrical systems, project execution, automation and increasingly digital technologies. Universities produce engineers. They produce far fewer engineers who can immediately deliver large-scale energy projects.
Instead of competing endlessly for a limited pool of experienced professionals, GPI has chosen a different strategy. It is trying to build them itself.
Building capability instead of buying it
Rather than relying heavily on lateral hiring, GPI recruits through campuses and employee referrals before investing in technical and leadership development.
“We first focus on hiring people and then we believe in developing them,” Das says. “We invest in training so employees can take up new roles and adapt to future technologies.”
The economics are straightforward. When every company pursues the same experienced engineers, salaries rise without increasing the overall talent pool. Developing graduates internally expands capability while allowing organisations to shape employees around their own operating practices.
“We first focus on hiring people and then we believe in developing them. We invest in training so employees can take up new roles and adapt to future technologies.”
Sandeep Das, CHRO, GPI
The trade-off is time.
An experienced project engineer contributes almost immediately. A graduate may require several years before becoming fully productive. As India’s renewable energy pipeline expands rapidly, companies must constantly balance immediate delivery pressures against long-term capability building.
GPI’s internal pipeline faces its real test as India’s renewable capacity targets compress timelines.
Learning for an industry that keeps changing
Unlike mature industries, renewable energy technologies evolve continuously.
Battery storage, smart grids, automation and green hydrogen have all altered the skills engineers require within a relatively short period.
GPI therefore maintains individual learning calendars combining technical training, behavioural development and cross-functional exposure.
“Technology keeps evolving,” Das says. “Along with technical skills, we also look for people who can solve problems, work as a team and adapt quickly to change.”
The emphasis on adaptability may ultimately matter as much as technical expertise. Today’s specialist knowledge can become outdated surprisingly quickly.
Das also argues that learning has to begin with leadership.
“Even I believe in continuous learning. I never sit quietly. Whenever I get an opportunity, I go for further studies, attend learning sessions and conferences.”
Employees generally notice what leaders do more readily than what organisations ask them to do.
Preparing for jobs that are still emerging
GPI combines a nine-box assessment framework with quarterly leadership programmes and technical capability reviews.
The objective is not simply succession planning but preparing employees for technologies and responsibilities that may not yet exist.
“Since we are into EPC, engineering, oil and gas, we have to continuously adapt to new technologies,” Das says.
That reflects a wider reality across the energy sector. Companies are increasingly developing people for future capability gaps rather than current vacancies.
The organisation also reports employees who have remained for five, ten, fifteen and even twenty years.
If sustained, that longevity matters. Engineering companies lose not only people through attrition but also project knowledge, customer relationships and technical expertise that are difficult to replace.
Keeping remote teams connected
Unlike software companies, renewable energy projects rarely happen in metropolitan offices.
Employees spend months at project sites, often in remote locations where professional isolation becomes as significant a challenge as technical execution.
“The first priority is always safety,” Das says. “After that, regular communication becomes extremely important because many employees are working in rural project locations.”
Graduate trainees therefore follow structured 30-60-90-day integration plans supported by regular manager conversations, recognition programmes and leadership engagement.
Whether these initiatives fully offset the realities of long project postings is difficult to judge. Site-based engineering remains demanding work, regardless of how well organisations communicate.
The industry’s bigger challenge
GPI’s approach reflects a problem confronting India’s entire clean energy sector.
Building renewable infrastructure requires more than investment, policy support and technology. It also requires thousands of engineers, project managers and technical specialists who currently remain in short supply.
No individual company can solve that shortage.
Educational institutions, industry bodies and employers will all need to expand the talent pipeline if India’s energy transition is to keep pace with its ambitions.
For now, GPI’s strategy is pragmatic. Instead of fighting competitors for the same limited talent, it is investing in creating capability internally.
Whether that proves sufficient will depend not just on one company’s learning programmes, but on whether India’s clean energy ecosystem can produce skilled engineers as quickly as it hopes to produce clean power.