Leading voices: Paul Cox

29 October 2025

The group chief executive of Energy & Utility Skills on attracting and retaining talent in the utilities sector, including the role of inclusive culture

Paul Cox won’t use the word ‘crisis’. “Calling it a skills crisis is clickbait,” says the recently appointed group chief executive of Energy & Utility Skills. “It suggests that the house is on fire and nobody's doing anything. This is not a crisis. There is definitely a lot to do, but there are a lot of very talented people doing a lot of very good work. We know many of our water company members are demonstrating best practice on a daily basis. It just needs to happen quicker than it has before.”

Energy & Utility Skills (EU Skills) works with 70 member organisations across the gas, power, water and wastewater industries (including all the UK water companies and the trade body British Water), as well as their supply chains. Energy & Utility Skills predicts that by the end of 2030, as people retire and new jobs are created (largely through infrastructure investment), the utilities sector will need to attract an additional 312,300 people into the workforce. The water sector accounts for 43,700 of that total, with a fairly even split across skill levels from entry level to senior leadership.

Entry level

Many of the challenges in this space are common to the whole utilities sector. Cox speaks eloquently and compassionately about the “shortage of talent today”, with 1.67 million people unemployed in the UK as of May 2025, alongside 569,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who are not in education, employment or training (known as NEETs) and are not actively seeking work.

“That latent workforce is a national priority to address,” says Cox. “It's so hard for those individuals. Things are really tight for them and for many individuals their confidence is very low.” Looked at positively though, “that's a big number of people who, not today, but in the near future, could be able to fill an awful lot of the skills gaps”.

To that end, Energy & Utility Skills is working with its partner organisations on a number of initiatives to remove barriers into the sector. These include plans for a new sector entry approach that gets people safely into supervised work within days rather than weeks or months, and a system that directs the unsuccessful applicants of oversubscribed roles to undersubscribed positions at other companies. This latter measure is particularly relevant for infrastructure projects (including those associated with the £104 bn earmarked for investment in the AMP8 regulatory cycle for water companies) that will depend heavily on workforce in the supply chain.

Cox says that these measures will “make it a little bit easier for that latent talent to understand how they get from A to B in quite a confusing world where they can be bombarded on loads of different platforms about jobs.

“We are seeking to create a ‘system’ that is as simple as possible. Simplicity is key as the scale of the sector entry opportunities across our members and industry is significant”.

If successful, redirecting unsuccessful applicants to other roles has the potential to be a win on multiple levels: “It might help the individual employer and their supply chain. If their supply chain does well, they do well. Then, if that member of staff goes into the supply chain and does well, they may well be recruited in the years to come where they were originally ‘regretted’.”

Moving across

The sector also needs to make it easier for professionals to move between industries and firms, says Cox: “In many sectors, for too long, people have gone to a new role, and because they haven't completed the company's training, they often are required to complete full training programmes and repeat what they already know and can do.” This is not only demoralising for the individual concerned, but inefficient and expensive for their employer. Energy & Utility Skills’ solution is to work with member organisations and industry to create ‘occupational profiles’ that make it easier to match applicants and roles. They’ve worked with USRO, the Construction Leadership Council (CLC), CSCS, Solar Energy UK, Renewable UK, National Grid, SSE, Scottish Power, and Cogent Skills and are currently working on occupational profiles for priority positions in other utilities for roll out in the future, including water.

“The potential of occupational profiles is significant,” says Cox. “It will save industry time and money”.

At the same time as addressing this technical recruitment challenge, however, the sector needs to consider the wider issue of organisational culture, Cox says. Are benefits such as flexible working and shared parental leave available to staff at all levels and in front line, customer facing and administrative roles? How should managers balance the expectations and needs of staff from different generations, particularly as young people from Generation Alpha begin to enter the workforce in the coming years?

“It's a leadership challenge, but also a sector attraction and retention opportunity,” says Cox. “If all of our social inclusion cultures don’t evolve”, staff will find “it's potentially too easy just to give up and walk away to a competitor or leave the sector all together.”

Building a framework

When it comes to tackling issues around skills, there’s as much enthusiasm in the water sector as in the other utilities, says Cox, but “at a system level, it is less advanced on workforce planning and skills”. This is down to the nitty gritty of government structures – the transition of the Green Jobs Delivery Group into the Office for Clean Energy Jobs, for example, inevitably deprioritised the water sector to the benefit of the energy sector.

With AMP8 and its £104b of investment now underway, Cox would like to see a rebalancing to create a similar structure for water, with government working alongside Energy & Utility Skills, CIWEM, Water UK, British Water, the Institute of Water and the private sector to create a system that “enables companies to retain and compete for talent”. Recent weeks have seen positive development on this, with the UK government and water companies having announced a series of recruitment, work experience and training initiatives at Water UK’s Skills Summit on 15 July that aims to attract an additional 106,000 people into the sector. For Cox, the “biggest win from the recent announcements is the shift in narrative to one of opportunity, ambition and renewal. This narrative gives our members and the whole water sector the opportunity to showcase the great work that we know is a feature of many companies.”

A well supported skills ecosystem will be vital if the sector is to overcome current negative public perceptions associated with pollution, leakage and governance to present a “compelling value proposition as to why somebody would work in water”, says Cox. This a central challenge given that the energy, infrastructure and house building sectors are each all seeking new talent to deliver growth.

“There has to be a shift out of the defensive because the opportunity [in the water sector] is enormous. To compete for talent we all need to attack the sector’s challenge with human-interest stories, a focus on ‘place’, the community benefit, the resilience benefit and the job security that such large-scale investment provides.”

Because ultimately, of course, filling the skills gap will come down to individual people deciding to take a chance on a new role, a new career, a new sector. “We talk about the tens of thousands and the hundreds of thousands, but that's all an aggregate of one person who has a family, a community, and a place,” says Cox. “It will be people that deliver.”

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CIWEM’s Your Future Report will be published on 29 October 2025.

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Jo Caird is editor of The Environment

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