Skills Demand in Energy Intensive Industries Targeting Industrial Symbiosis and Energy Efficiency

Technological development, closely related to the implementation of industrial symbiosis and energy efficiency, affects all areas of energy intensive industries, and involves the whole industrial workforce. This paper deals with a part of the work developed in the early stage of a current Erasmus+ project, which aims at developing an industry-driven and proactive skills strategy to assist the implementation and exploitation of industrial symbiosis and energy efficiency across the energy intensive sectors. The paper presents the current state of workforce in the context of industrial symbiosis and energy efficiency implementations. The most recent literature on the effects of new skills requirement and training needs for the European process industry workforce is analyzed and discussed. In addition, implementation advantages and barriers as well as possible solutions to satisfy ongoing and future skill demands are considered. Through skill integrations and workforce attraction and training, new skills, and greater abilities for working across sector boundaries can be achieved. In addition, policies on green economy and on skills development can enable anticipating labor market changes, by identifying skill requirement impacts. This can be achieved by introducing new training programs, revising existing ones and by monitoring the impact of trainings on the labor market.