British Gas Announces Focus on Training Green Engineers

Apparently the coalition government is good news for green jobs, according to British Gas. This company is rapidly increasing its recruitment and retraining of engineers to be fit for “green jobs.” The energy supplier sees the new coalition government’s, between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, plan to help households fiance renewable power generation and heating equipment as a key moment in the expansion of the market for things like solar panels and power boilers.

Just last week, British Gas actually opened its first Green Skills training center in Tredegar, South Wales. This center can train up to 1,300 people each year in green energy-related skills for British Gas and even other companies.

The company is also hiring and retraining engineers to form a 1,100 strong home insulation division by the end of next March. The managing director of communities and new energy at British Gas, Gearoid Lane, said that this center has been part financed by European funds and the Welsh Assembly. The center will be churning out large numbers of deeply green skilled people who will be out there installing technology in households and businesses. There is no way this capacity would have been created unless the company was seeing substantial demand for skilled engineers.

British Gas has 10,000 engineers in its domestic business and 1,000 have already been re-skilled as green engineers. The company is also accelerating its recruitment and retraining plans as it becomes more confident that demand will exist for these green skills in the near feature. The company has at least 100 of its engineers trained to install micro generation equipment. This includes things like small wind turbines and solar panels.