Grid technicians and the capacity to train and supervise them

On 14 November 2025 grid operators, contractors and government presented the Opschalingsplan 2030, a plan to scale up the technical workforce. The aim is 5,000 extra technicians by 2030, with €25 million in subsidy from the national Climate Fund and more than €200 million from the sector itself. Netbeheer Nederland, the association of Dutch grid operators, names the limited capacity for training and supervision as the main bottleneck. Until now each party mostly recruited for itself; now six to seven regional partnerships are being set up with regional vocational colleges (ROCs) and regional employment centres, under the name Infra Talenten. In recruitment, the Arbeidsmatchplatform, a job-matching platform, looks at candidates’ skills rather than their work experience or qualifications. A separate programme is to guide 1,000 refugees with a residence permit into technical work. According to the chair of Netbeheer Nederland, grid operators and contractors need 30,000 technicians by 2030; the plan delivers 5,000 of them.

In its Stand van de Uitvoering (progress report) for 2025, published on 2 April 2026, Netbeheer Nederland writes that the number of staff at grid operators and contractors grew in 2025, but not enough to keep up with the growth in work. The companies are investing in joint company training schools, training refugees and career changers, and bringing in fitters, site supervisors and engineers from abroad. The half-year figures of 5 October 2026 show what the shortage means. In the first half of 2026, 19 neighbourhoods had their grid fully reinforced, against 20 in the whole of 2025, while grid operators need to reach about 1,000 neighbourhoods a year. Some projects in the neighbourhood programme are temporarily on hold because of staff shortages. Fitting meters to local substations is slow, because the same scarce technicians are also needed for expansion, maintenance and outages. Grid operators are working on higher productivity and different ways of working to make the best use of the talent available. One example from the report is working on de-energised cables, which is safer for fitters and gets more cable laid per day.

The shortage reaches beyond the grid operators. On 18 December 2025 the Dutch employee insurance agency (UWV) linked its labour market tightness indicator for the end of 2024 to the forecasts to 2030 of ROA, the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market. For the 91,800 electricians and electronics fitters the market is very tight and will stay that way; for electrical engineers the market is very tight and the shortage is getting worse.

In World Energy Employment 2025, published on 5 December 2025, the IEA finds the same pattern worldwide. Of the more than 700 energy companies, unions and training providers in its annual survey, more than half report critical bottlenecks in recruitment, a share that has been rising for years. In grid occupations there are 1.4 workers nearing retirement for every young entrant, against 1.2 on average across the economy. According to the IEA, two in three new hires up to 2035 will be needed just to replace retirements. Almost half of companies already recruit from adjacent sectors or do more training themselves, but fewer than a quarter help shape the curriculum of training programmes.

How solid is this? The shortage of technicians is a multi-year series from Netbeheer Nederland and is confirmed by UWV and ROA and by the IEA. What is new in the past year is that the sector identifies training and supervision capacity as the brake and that work is demonstrably on hold. How the regional approach works out has not yet been measured. So the picture is not yet settled.