“Clean” Natural Gas, Skills Based Hiring, $128M Delaware Offshore Deal

We discuss the rapid rise of skills-based hiring in wind energy,
with 81% of employers now prioritizing competency over degrees.
Delaware strikes a major $128 million offshore wind agreement. We
tackle the idea of "clean" natural gas. And mounting cybersecurity
concerns arise as Chinese manufacturers gain control of critical
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www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen
Hall: Skills based hiring shakes up wind energy recruitment, while
Delaware strikes a 128 million offshore wind deal. Plus, what's
really behind those clean, natural gas claims? This is the Uptime
Wind Energy Podcast. You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy
Podcast, brought to you by BuildTurbines. com. Learn, train, and be
a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com
today. Now, here's your hosts. Alan Hall, Joel Saxom, Phil Totaro,
and Rosemary Barnes. Hey, Allen Hall: Uptime family. We've got
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and our Wind energy O& M Australia event is on in a big way.
We're all gonna be down there February 11th and 12th Bill, you want
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the conference? Phil Totaro: Yeah, so we just had two, uh, very big
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today and explore sponsorships at www. windaustralia. com. Allen
Hall: Well, the U. S. Department of Labor published a Skills First
Hiring Starter Kit last fall, and this has touched off a broader
discussion about worker qualifications. And in 2024, 81 percent of
employers Uh, practice skills based hiring up from 73 percent in
2023 and just 56 percent in 2022, according to some research. So
it's up by 30%, almost 30 percent right now since 2022. Now, an
analysis by Indeed, which is a job site, found the number of job
postings requiring at least a four year degree fell to 17. 8
percent in January of 2024 compared to about 20 percent in 2019. So
the number of employers who are requiring degrees to even apply for
a job has dropped and there are more employers looking for skills.
Rather than diplomas, which is an interesting trend. And Joel was
mentioning before we started today that Elon Musk put out a Twitter
post or I guess it's an ex post now. about this particular topic.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Today he's, he put a post out. It says, if you're
a hardcore software engineer and want to build the everything app,
please join us by sending your best work to code at X. com. That's
not the important part. The important part here is what he states
is we don't care where you went to school or even whether you went
to a school or what big name company you worked at. Just show us
your code. And to me, I think that's amazing because I guess
there's, it's a pendulum swing. My whole life as a young person in
the United States, it was, you got to get a good job. You got to
get a degree. You got to get a degree. You got to get a degree. And
then you see that being beat into the culture. And then the cost of
these degrees just going crazy over here, right now. I mean, an
average four year degree, you're paying 80, 100, a hundred thousand
dollars plus just to get over or more, right? Yeah. Alan's, Alan's
giving me the thumbs up way more. So, so, you know, if, if I, if I
I'm in Texas right here in Austin, if I want to go to UT Austin.
It's going to cost me like 40 to 45, 000 a year for your degree.
That's 180, 000 degree that like, that's so, uh, like it's so much
of a hurdle to employment and to growing, uh, growing employment as
a society and in good jobs, and I think that like, from my
standpoint, I've always. Try to lean on this. If you're a hard
worker, if you've got some skills, I don't care where you've worked
in the past, I don't care what school you went to, or even if you
went to one, if you can do the job, let's do the damn job. And
that's my take on it. Rosemary Barnes: Uh, so one thing that I
think has changed recently is that in the past, like the reason why
you would say you want X degree is because you want someone that
has the knowledge that you would learn in that degree. Um, but
these days there's like nothing that you can't learn well on the
internet, just as well as in a degree. It's kind of insane the way
that now that we have the internet available, it's insane to keep
on doing it in the same way. So I think now, yeah, like we can
still have the same requirement that we used to have in terms of
knowledge. But it doesn't need to be so gatekept by the
universities. But that said, I do think that there's some kinds of
engineering, like a lot of what people call engineering, I don't
think needs a degree, you know, um, and especially the things that
need engineering sign off. Like it's really rare that you actually
need to use your engineering judgment for something like that. It's
much more often, you need to just check what's being done, check
what the design standard says, and make sure that it fits within
that. I don't think you need a degree for that. Where I think you
need engineers is where something comes outside of the design
standard so that an engineer can make sure that, you know,
everything has been considered that should have and, um, you know,
do the analyses that are required and just, you know, use their
professional experience and education to make sure that, You're not
inadvertently doing something unsafe. Joel Saxum: I think when,
when engineering, when you talk engineering this way, the gap for
me would be when liability rolls into place. So if you're designing
a bridge, I would like someone to sign off on that, that can
demonstrate, demonstrate from. whatever training and these things
that they've, they've achieved a certain level of being an engineer
to, and in the States, that would be a structural engineer with a
SCE stamp. And that makes sense to me. Rosemary Barnes: The higher
the stakes, the less that you should be needing someone that has
any sort of judgment applied to it. You know, it should be a really
rigorous standard that was definitely developed by engineers. Um,
make sure that that standard, you know, covers everything that it
needs to. And then the person signing off should just be saying
that it, It has done what the standard says it should do. I don't
think that there is, or should be, a lot of individual judgment in
place about, will this bridge fall down? Will this aeroplane fall
out of the sky? Will this, uh, I don't know, um, petrol station
explode? You know, like that shouldn't be somebody's like
individual call on whether a valve is big enough or a bolt is
replaced frequently enough. There shouldn't be any judgment calls
there. It should just be kind of, you know, do it as, um, as the
design standard says. And that design standard is really rigorous
and performed by engineers. Phil Totaro: Let's put it this way. As
we're talking about engineering, you know, I think skills based
hiring is potentially more applicable than it would be, say, in
like the medical field, for example. Like, I don't want somebody
who's just watched a bunch of YouTube videos on surgery to perform
brain surgery on me. So, you know, there's, I think there's a
difference. Uh, maybe we can, you know, there's a bit more margin
you can get away with. Uh, doing this sort of thing for engineering
as, as society evolves and all that. But, uh, yeah, I, I don't know
if it's applicable everywhere. Rosemary Barnes: I think that
sometimes like in Australia, I've never heard that term skills
based hiring and until today, but I have noticed, you know, early
in my career, people cared that I had my accredited engineering
degree and was eligible to be a member of Engineers Australia. I
don't know. It's been decade, decades, more than one decade,