Energy jobs explained — who actually does what

"Energy" covers a utility with ninety thousand staff and a nine-person electrolyser start-up. The job titles overlap, the same word means different things in each, and someone outside the sector reading a listing has very little chance of working out what the work is.

This is the map. It is written for someone competent who has not worked in energy before, because that describes most of the people the sector needs to hire.

First, the shape of the industry

Almost every energy company sits in one of four places, and knowing which one you are looking at explains most of what a job listing means.

Developers and operators find sites, get them permitted, finance them, build them and run them. Wind farms, solar parks, battery sites, heat networks. The work is long-horizon and heavily project-shaped, and the constraint is almost never the technology — it is permitting, grid connection and money.

Manufacturers build the physical things: turbines, cells, electrolysers, transformers, heat pumps. Real hardware engineering, real supply chains, real factories.

Network operators — the TSOs and DSOs — own the wires. Regulated, conservative, enormous, and currently the bottleneck for everything else in the sector.

Software and services sell into all three: trading platforms, asset optimisation, monitoring, forecasting, grid modelling. Usually the easiest entry point from outside the sector, because the domain knowledge is learnable on the job and the engineering transfers directly.

The roles, in plain language

Engineering

The largest function on this board, and the one whose titles mislead most.

Power systems engineer — models how electricity flows through a network. Load flow, fault levels, stability, protection. This is the discipline most in demand and least transferable from software, because it is genuinely electrical engineering.

Grid connection engineer — gets a project connected. Half technical, half a long negotiation with the network operator. Every developer needs one; nobody has enough.

Electrical / mechanical design engineer — designs the plant: substations, balance of plant, cell stacks. Mostly at manufacturers and EPCs.

Software engineer — at an energy company, usually building forecasting, SCADA integration, trading tooling, or the platform that runs a fleet of assets. Ordinary software engineering against unusually messy time-series data.

Commissioning engineer — the person on site making the thing actually run. Practical, travel-heavy, hard to hire, and one of the most reliable ways into the sector for anyone with a hands-on engineering background.

Project and development

Project developer — takes a site from an idea to a financial investment decision. Land, permits, grid, offtake, money. Commercial as much as technical, and the closest thing the sector has to a general-manager track.

Project manager — delivers what the developer sold. Schedule, contractors, budget, the gap between the plan and the ground.

Permitting and consenting — the planning and environmental approvals. Unglamorous, routinely the critical path of a whole project, and understaffed almost everywhere.

Commercial and market-facing

Originator — sells the electricity before it exists. Power purchase agreements, offtake structuring. Highly paid, small population, and one of the few roles where "sales" and "quantitative" genuinely both apply.

Energy trader / analyst — trades power, gas or certificates on the day-ahead and intraday markets. Closer to a trading floor than to a utility, and hires accordingly.

Asset manager — runs an operating asset commercially once it is built: availability, revenue, contracts.

Data and analytics

Forecasting / data scientist — predicting generation, demand and price. The most directly transferable role for anyone arriving from tech, and a real one: dispatch decisions are made on these numbers.

Modelling analyst — techno-economic models of projects or systems. Often the entry point into development.

Who you work for, and why it changes the job

Five kinds of employer hire for the same titles and offer materially different careers.

Utilities and network operators — large, regulated, stable. Structured graduate schemes, real training, pensions, and slower progression. The best place to acquire a regulated engineering discipline and the hardest place to move quickly.

Developers and IPPs — mid-sized, commercial, project-driven. The work is deal-shaped and the pace follows the pipeline. Highest ceiling for anyone with a commercial instinct.

Manufacturers — hardware, supply chains, factories. Engineering-led, and the only part of the sector where the thing you build is a physical object you can hold.

Start-ups and scale-ups — where most of the interesting technology is, and most of the risk. Broad scope, thin support, equity instead of salary, and a real chance the company does not exist in three years. This is where the storage, hydrogen and grid-software hiring is concentrated.

Consultancies and EPCs — advisory and delivery for everyone above. Fast exposure to many parts of the sector, which is genuinely the quickest way to learn it, at the cost of never owning an asset yourself.

What the same title means in different places

Three worth knowing, because they cause the most wasted applications.

"Analyst" at a trading firm is a quantitative market role. At a developer it is spreadsheet-based project finance. At a consultancy it is research. The salary range across those three is enormous.

"Engineer" at a network operator implies chartership and a regulated discipline. At an energy software company it means software. Both are advertised as "engineer, energy".

"Manager" in this sector frequently manages a project rather than people. A "wind project manager" may have no reports at all.

How a company's stage changes the same job

A "project manager" at a developer with nothing built yet and a project manager at an operating utility do different work under one title, and the stage explains more about a listing than the job description does.

Pre-FID — before the final investment decision. Everything is options and analysis: land, grid, permits, models. Small teams, high uncertainty, and the work is genuinely about whether the project should exist. Suits people who like ambiguity and can tolerate projects being cancelled.

Construction — the money is committed and the constraint is delivery. Contractors, schedule, budget, site. Larger teams, harder deadlines, and a very different temperament required from the phase before.

Operating — the asset exists and the question is squeezing revenue and availability out of it. Asset management, trading, maintenance, optimisation. Steadier, more analytical, and where most of the long-term jobs actually are.

Manufacturing is its own axis: prototype, pilot line, volume. An engineer joining before the pilot line is doing R&D; one joining after is doing process engineering. Both are advertised as "engineer".

A listing that does not say which of these it is has told you something too — usually that whoever wrote it has not thought about who they are trying to attract.

Getting in from outside

The sector is short of people and generally willing to hire on transferable skill, but it is uneven about which skills.

Easiest routes in: software, data, finance, procurement, legal, HSE. These transfer almost directly, and energy software companies in particular hire on general engineering ability and teach the domain.

Harder: anything that needs a specific regulated engineering discipline. Power systems engineering is not learnable in a quarter, and the listings that say so mean it.

The thing that actually helps: pick a sub-sector and learn its economics rather than its technology. Anyone can read about how a battery works. Being able to explain why a battery in the Netherlands makes money differently from one in Germany is what gets you through a first interview, and it is a weekend of reading rather than a degree.

There is a fuller guide to switching in, and if you want the geography first, where the roles actually are.