Five-step plan to support smooth transitions in hydropower workforce

New resources equip hydropower organizations with tools that can facilitate smooth succession planning and promote sound knowledge-sharing practices.

The good news: Hydropower’s reliability means it plays — and will continue to play — an important role in the electricity grid, supporting variable renewables like solar and wind. Existing and new hydropower projects are expected to play a key role in the transition to 100% clean energy in the electricity sector. That could mean a significant increase in the number of hydropower workers.

The bad news: The hydropower industry’s workforce is undergoing major changes as more workers retire. The industry now faces the daunting challenge of not only ensuring it can hire enough workers to fill all the necessary roles, but also minimizing the loss of organizational knowledge due to employee departures.

The loss of organizational knowledge can have serious consequences, such as decreased productivity as new employees become familiar with organizational practices, or increased pressure on current employees, which can cause dissatisfaction and potentially lead to additional employee turnover.

New resources from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) can help hydropower organizations prepare for workforce turnover and reduce knowledge loss to ensure hydropower continues to play an important role in our clean energy future.

The Knowledge Sharing and Succession Planning Toolkit presents a five-step process that any hydropower organization, regardless of its stage of workforce transformation, can use to establish a system and culture of knowledge sharing.

“When we started this project, we realized that there were very few hydropower-specific resources for succession planning and knowledge sharing,” said Adam Kanter, a workforce development researcher at NREL and lead author of the toolkit. “But we see that hydropower is one of the industries that needs this type of help the most.”

To create the toolkit, Kanter spent several months gathering expertise from other sources involved in workforce development, then sought input from members of hydropower associations and organizations.

“We had a good mix of perspectives—some technical people from the hydro industry, but also people from human resources who had some experience with knowledge sharing and succession planning,” Kanter said. “Their input really strengthened the toolkit.”

How to use the toolkit

The toolkit includes two important concepts essential to successful workforce transformation: knowledge sharing, the process of capturing skills and information and making that knowledge available to all employees; and succession planning, which helps leaders identify key positions in organizations and prepare employees to fill openings as employees retire or leave.

These concepts are embedded in the toolkit’s step-by-step approach, which first guides organizations through assessing, documenting, capturing, and sharing existing knowledge. The tool then guides them through making necessary changes and developing a plan to regularly revisit each topic.

Each of the five steps includes downloadable tools, templates, and checklists that simplify the process of assessing organizational knowledge sharing practices. Examples of completed worksheets are also included with each step, so the organization can see what types of information it should be collecting.

But the beauty of this toolkit is its flexibility, Kanter said.

“People can use it chronologically, from Step 1 to Step 5, or they can go straight to creating a job profile,” Kanter said. “One of the main goals we had in creating this tool was to make sure it was useful to people no matter where they were in the process. If they’ve already assessed their organization and want to make sure they’re doing it right, they can use this to validate their ideas.”

The toolkit was released publicly in April 2024 and has already been shared with a number of hydropower industry partners, from whom Kanter is still seeking feedback. “One of the great things about having the toolkit online is that we can continue to update it to fill in gaps and respond to industry feedback,” Kanter said.

Hydropower partners will also be able to schedule one-on-one sessions with Kanter to request assistance, get answers to questions or provide feedback.

“This toolkit comes at a time when hydropower organizations need help to ensure they have a skilled, competent workforce ready to help hydropower take its place in the clean energy transformation,” Kanter said.