According to the State Employment Service and the Unified Job Portal, at the beginning of 2026, the number of vacancies in the energy sector exceeded the number of candidates several times over. In some regions, the situation is even more acute: in Kyiv, the ratio of vacancies to job seekers in the energy industry reached 39 to 1. And this is more than a labor market issue. This is a matter of the country's energy resilience.
The Energy Sector Lacks People, Not Equipment
Ukrainian energy today relies heavily on people with many years of experience. However, the industry is aging rapidly. Some specialists are retiring, some have gone abroad, or have changed their field of activity. At the same time, young people are less likely to choose energy as a profession.
The reason is not only salaries. Young specialists often see the energy sector as a complex, physically demanding, and dangerous field with night shifts, emergency dispatches, and high stress levels. Against this background, IT, service companies, or creative industries look much more attractive.
But the problem runs deeper. Energy is a sector where you cannot quickly replace a person. Experience here is accumulated over years. One specialist often holds critically important functions that cannot be handed over after a few weeks of training. As a result, the workload on teams is growing, and the risk of professional burnout is becoming systemic.
Knowledge That Could Vanish with a Generation
Today in Ukraine, there are already specialties where the staff shortage is becoming critical. For example, to restore thermal power plants, turbine engineers are needed — specialists who work with turbine equipment and possess highly specialized knowledge. Only a handful of such specialists remain in Ukraine, mostly of older age. Their experience was shaped over decades, but there is increasingly no one to pass this knowledge on to.
The war has only intensified this pressure. Emergency restoration teams work at night, under difficult weather conditions, and sometimes near facilities that remain under threat of repeated attacks. The psychological toll in this work is colossal, as it involves responsibility for the electricity and heat supply of cities, hospitals, and critical infrastructure.
The intensity of work in the energy sector has increased significantly in recent years. In many companies, teams work virtually without days off, in a mode of constant readiness for emergency dispatches and restoration work. This exhausts even experienced specialists, and for young people, it often looks like a profession with too high a cost to their personal resources.
The state has already responded to the problem with localized solutions — in particular, additional payments for workers in emergency restoration teams. But strategically, this is not enough. The main challenge lies in the lack of a systemic approach to training new personnel.
Today, a significant part of the costs of training young specialists actually falls on the companies themselves. And this is particularly difficult in conditions where the market operates under the pressure of debts, limited investments, and constant expenses for infrastructure restoration.
Training in the energy sector is not just theory. It is the time of an experienced specialist who works slower because they are simultaneously training a young worker. In other words, the company pays for the work of both the mentor and the trainee, as well as the additional time to complete tasks.
And here another problem arises — the state procurement system. If the key criterion for winning a tender remains solely the lowest price, companies that systematically invest in training young specialists automatically find themselves at a disadvantage. Because their cost of production is objectively higher.
Some Ukrainian companies are already trying to solve the staff shortage problem on their own. They launch internal mentorship programs, cooperate with vocational education institutions, and train young specialists directly on the job. For example, in the engineering and industrial consortium Energo-Plus, young specialists undergo practical training alongside the company's experienced engineers. But today, such investments remain primarily the responsibility of the business itself, rather than part of a systemic state policy.
In Ukraine, such practices are only beginning to scale. According to a study by the KSE Institute and the Ministry of Education and Science, only 1.4% of Ukrainian companies are involved in dual education, while the average figure in the EU is 32.4%. For comparison: in Germany, dual education is part of the country's economic model. About 400,000 companies participate in training young specialists, and businesses receive incentives to invest in personnel training as part of long-term economic resilience.
Ukraine is also gradually moving in this direction. However, the personnel deficit in the energy sector is already so deep that it requires much faster solutions.
The Battle for Youth Will Determine the Future of Energy
Energy today is a high-tech field where the role of automation, digital control systems, distributed generation, energy storage systems, and smart grid solutions is growing. And if the industry wants to compete for youth, it must not only raise salaries but also change the very perception of the profession.
Without systemic investments in people, no restoration of the energy sector will be sustainable. Because a power grid is not just substations, networks, or generation. Above all, it is the people who ensure its operation every day.
