By 2035, two out of every three new hires across the energy sector will be needed just to replace people who are retiring. The scarce seat is the technical authority, and an organisation's willingness to let someone sign takes years to build.
A note from Andy. I closed last month by calling technical-authority succession a quiet problem today and a very expensive one in about three years. This month I want to put numbers against that, because they read worse than the anecdote does. With APPEC and Gastech both running in September, there will be a great deal of discussion about what Asia is going to build.
Two in every three, just to stand still
The International Energy Agency published World Energy Employment 2025 in December, and it contains a figure that belongs at the front of every workforce plan in this industry. On current trends, by 2035, two out of every three new hires across the energy sector will be needed just to replace people who are retiring.
The supporting numbers are blunt. Across advanced economies the sector has around 2.4 workers approaching retirement for every worker under 25. In emerging and developing economies the ratio is closer to one to one. Economy-wide demand for applied technical workers, who make up more than half of the energy workforce, grew 16 per cent between 2015 and 2022, while graduations from the relevant vocational programmes rose 9 per cent. Roughly 60 per cent of the companies the IEA surveyed reported labour shortages affecting project timelines and system reliability.
Every sanctioned project carries an implied staffing plan, and most of those plans assume a labour market that the demographics do not support, as discussed last month.
And it has stopped moving
Additionally, the Global Energy Talent Index, published by Airswift in February 2026 from a survey of more than 9,000 energy professionals across 143 countries, puts willingness to relocate internationally in oil and gas at 75 per cent, down from 80 per cent in 2025 and 89 per cent in 2022. The reason cited most often for staying put is proximity to family.
Seventy-five per cent still sounds comfortable, which is where the aggregate misleads, and where I think part of the fall is compositional. It is not that any individual has become less willing to move than someone in their position would have been in 2022; rather it's likely that the workforce itself has aged into the bracket that was always least willing. The people I am asked to find for a first-of-a-kind project in a difficult jurisdiction are usually in their late forties or fifties. That is the group with children mid-way through school and parents who have become a consideration. Willingness is not spread evenly across the population, it is thinnest exactly where the hardest postings are. For as long as this industry has had frontier projects, it has staffed them by moving a small, mobile cadre of experienced people to them. That model seems to be expiring.
What is a technical authority?
A technical authority is the person a company has decided can approve a deviation on a safety-critical system, or accept a design that does not quite meet the standard. The value is not the knowledge (which is written down) but the judgement about when the written answer does not apply, and that's built by having carried the consequences of getting it wrong.
That's why the seat cannot be filled hastily. You can hire the qualifications easily enough, but the organisation's willingness to let that person sign takes longer, and on many assets it is granted informally, before it is recorded anywhere.
It is also why the loss is invisible until it is not. A technical authority who retires leaves a role that still looks filled on the org chart. What has gone is the speed at which decisions used to get made. That turns up as schedule slip six or nine months later, and it is rarely attributed correctly.
The remedy
None of this is difficult to fix. It is difficult to prioritise, which is a different problem and a worse one.
Name the successor while the incumbent is still in the role. A named deputy who signs alongside for two years and is understood by the organisation to be next, because authority transfers when other people start accepting it, more than when it is announced.
Design the role around rotation rather than relocation. If the mobile cadre is shrinking, stop building jobs that require a family to move to a difficult city for four years. Regional hubs, shorter tours, split residency and a two-person handover will reach candidates that an expat package no longer attracts.
The objection is that all of this costs money, which is true, and it is most of why it does not happen. But a competitor can match the budget. What it cannot do is compress the two years it takes for an organisation to trust someone's signature, which is why the operators who start now are building something rivals cannot copy quickly.
On the ground
Three things I am watching.
Commissioning and start-up leadership on the Asian gas projects reaching that phase in 2027. The bench is thinner than the sanction announcements imply, and it is the same handful of names in every conversation.
If willingness to move is falling while the requirement is not, the price has to move. I would expect upward corrections on hardship postings in West and Central Africa and in Central Asia over the medium term.
Technical authority inside joint ventures specifically, where two parent companies' standards meet and it is not always clear whose authority governs. That ambiguity is manageable while the experienced people are still in post. It is much harder afterwards.
Next month I want to stay with joint ventures and look at what it takes to stand a JV leadership team up from nothing.
Sign-off
If you are building leadership teams across operators, EPC and energy infrastructure, from project directors to country leads, that is the ground I work on, and I am easy to reach.