D11.1 The future requirements for HBO, WO and postgraduate personnel in the hydrogen industry

As the Dutch government and organisations continues to implement plans for the production and use of hydrogen in the ongoing energy transition, there is an expected surge in demand for human capital with hydrogen-related skills at applied universities (HBO), universities (WO), and postgraduate levels. While it's true that some of these skills can be transferred from existing sectors such as natural gas network operators and renewable energy developers, the scale of the government's plans to rollout hydrogen at large scale means that a mismatch between the supply and demand of specialized personnel across various disciplines is likely to arise.

The goal of this study was to qualitatively examine the skills and competences needed for trained personnel in the HBO (applied sciences education), WO (scientific education), and postgraduate education (retraining of professionals) levels in the Netherlands, in order to work in the hydrogen transport sector; this was done with a focus on the skills and training needed for the gas network operation sector.

In this work, we present an estimation of the number of trained personnel that will be needed in the hydrogen transport industry in the Netherlands, where we found that between 1,800 and 4,700 full time jobs could be required in 2030 for the construction of hydrogen distribution systems or work in commissioning hydrogen transport to the built environment, and between 4,200 and 12,500 full time jobs could be made available to work in the operation and maintenance of such networks. These values are heavily dependent on the degree of uptake of hydrogen in the built environment.

Moreover, we carried out a series of interviews with stakeholders in the hydrogen industry in the Netherlands, and we identified the most important hard skills that are needed by trained personnel in the hydrogen industry. The interviews and analysis revealed that engineering skills, across various disciplines, were the most frequently mentioned.

Next to the stakeholder interviews, we analysed the current job postings on a popular job posting website, where we identified 40 job postings that are specifically recruiting hydrogen professionals. We proceeded to carry out an analysis regarding the most common hard and soft skills requested by the job postings, as well as the levels of education needed to fulfil those vacancies. We found that most of the vacancies are looking for engineers with either a Bachelor’s Degree (that can also be understood as HBO training) or a Master’s Degree (WO training) in engineering disciplines, with Chemical engineering being the most frequently asked (followed by mechanical and electrical engineering).

We finalise this report by adding a series of recommendations for different stakeholders (educators, industry and government) on how to enhance hydrogen in the existing curricula and what practices could ensued that sufficient trained personnel in the area of hydrogen are made available in the following years to fulfil the expected rise in job openings in the energy transition and hydrogen in particular, thereby preventing potential gridlocks caused by a lack of specialized personnel.