A thriving innovation workforce, essentially the collection of people that do the work in an innovation ecosystem, is the output of coordinated, collective action. Schools, startup alumni, job boards, events and conferences, unions, recruiting agencies, government entities, continuing education and corporate training programs all contribute to building the workforce. What these programs and organizations do is build the talent, specifically the skills and capabilities, that people need to create long-lasting careers in the innovation economy.
With each step toward becoming a world-class innovation ecosystem, the execution challenge gets increasingly gnarly. Building a cleantech innovation workforce is particularly difficult because of the industry’s scale and breadth. Finding an accurate measure of the size for the entire cleantech workforce in the US is challenging, but recent estimates of just the clean energy workforce have it at somewhere around 3.5M (roughly the size of the US federal government’s workforce) and growing at a rate of 4.2% y-o-y. While clean energy is a labor intensive segment of the cleantech workforce, it is only one of six major verticals within cleantech, so 3.5M is certainly an underestimate. Not all of these 3.5+M workers are in the innovation workforce either, however they are desperately needed because they procure, build, install and finance cleantech innovation. The innovation workforce itself makes up a relatively small portion of the entire cleantech workforce.
For context Greentown Labs, one of the largest/most successful cleantech incubators in the country, noted that its startups had only created over 11,000 jobs since its launch in 2011. Greentown Labs is one of many incubators in country and not every cleantech company runs through an incubator, so, again this is an underestimate, but the order of magnitude difference between the innovation and inclusive cleantech workforce is roughly correct. The challenge is that those 11,000ish jobs span an incredibly wide range of skills; for example, a company developing a battery technology may need electrochemists, materials scientists, a cadre of engineers (electrical, mechanical, power, systems, software) and the technicians and leadership to support them. For a cleantech innovation ecosystem to thrive, it needs a holistic plan to develop a workforce with significant scale, and also with specificity and breadth.
Building an innovation workforce requires massive collaboration, so how well is the cleantech ecosystem positioned to deliver on the critical task in Georgia?
What Does Good Look Like?
Luckily, we do not have to look far. Georgia’s manufacturing workforce building engine is a preeminent example. The Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG) and the University System of Georgia (USG) are central institutions that have shaped and evolved the state’s workforce for over 60 years. Both organizations have been quick to respond to the recent needs of the cleantech manufacturers locating with the state. TCSG, through its QuickStart program, has designed highly tailored training programs in close collaboration with Hanwah QCells, SK Battery America, and most recently, the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America.
TCSG also manages the state’s Worksource programs and its array of technical training facilities, including the Advanced Manufacturing Training Center located outside of Savannah. Likewise, the USG has developed manufacturing engineer degree programs at Kennesaw State University and Southern Georgia University targeted at preparing engineers for leadership roles at modern factories. These programs are further supported by a network of local nonprofits (e.g. Keep Glynn Running, Murray Works Employment Academy, and Project Purpose) that extend their reach. The hallmarks of the state’s workforce development efforts are their cross-organization coordination, their customer-centric approach, and their ability to adapt quickly to changing workforce needs.
While a cleantech innovation workforce and a cleantech manufacturing workforce are fundamentally different, they are complementary. Building a physical product, after all, is the eventual outcome for many innovators. An innovation workforce needs new graduates, mid-career leaders and startup C-suites that have the technical skills, but also the personality traits that enable them to thrive in fast-moving, often ambiguous work environments. In innovation ecosystems, a candidate’s drive, discipline, passion and trust can outweigh their GPA in recruiting and hiring decisions. These traits are almost impossible to test in traditional recruiting and the cost of mismatches is high. Therefore, innovation workforce training needs a heavy component of experiential learning opportunities (e.g., sponsored student projects, co-op training, and internships).
Where is Georgia Today (Fall 2024)?
Current State for Innovation Workforce Demand
In our previous post Stock the innovation funnel with a startup focus, we highlighted that building a critical mass of startups is an initial priority for an innovation ecosystem. If follows then that initial workforce-building efforts should be geared toward startup needs. Today, Georgia has 54 cleantech startups of which 43 are early stage. These early stage companies have few (<10), mostly technical employees that are focused on technology development and achieving product-market fit. The remaining 11 companies have achieved product-market fit and are focused on scaling their businesses and building their organizations. Furthermore, there may be another 5-10 business concepts or technologies preparing to exit universities or stealth mode in the coming months. This cohort of companies have common and unique workforce needs:
- The very early and stealth companies need versatile engineers/scientists and startup executives that can navigate fragile organizations through uncertain times
- The early-stage companies also need versatile engineers with startup personality traits but they also need the first tranche of C-suite leaders that augment the founding team and are eager to get their hands dirty
- The later stage companies still need the engineering talent, but also need startup-ready functional leaders, many of whom also need to have niche skills and experience that help startups make big transitions in operations, sales/marketing and administration.
Current State for Innovation Workforce Supply
Earlier in this series, it was highlighted that Georgia educates and attracts diverse STEM talent at world-class rate. In 2024, the state’s universities minted a diverse cohort of >10,000 science and engineering undergraduate and post graduates. Georgia is also a magnet for top flight engineering talent, with over 14,000 engineers working in the state from the nation’s top 10 engineering schools. These worker pools are great sources for the science and engineering roles that companies need to fill at any stage in the innovation funnel.
The startups themselves are also major developers of innovation workforces. The “Fairchildren” and the “Paypal Mafia” are legendary alumni groups known for their prowess in creating unicorn startups, and there are now myriad prominent startup alumni groups around the world (and here in GA as well). In cleantech, Tesla, SunEdison, SunPower, FirstSolar, Google (Nest), Silver Spring Networks and a number of others have been the standard bearers in developing the cleantech innovation workforce in today’s leading ecosystems. Georgia’s nascent cleantech innovation ecosystem is still growing its premier companies and alumni networks, until these reach critical mass there needs to be concerted effort to retain the workers that the ecosystem trains as well as attract startup-ready workforce from more established regional innovation ecosystems.
The cleantech innovation workforce needs diversity and inclusivity at all levels and in all role types. Diverse and inclusive companies innovate better, full stop. Diversity of thought, lived-experience, expertise and approach create tension that in inclusive environments can be channeled positively and productively into testing long-held assumptions and breaking the status quo. Georgia not only develops a diverse workforce through its training programs, but has a spike in expertise in lowering the barriers to inclusion. These efforts, led by nonprofits like the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation, Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurs and Goodie Nation, boost connectivity and create new pathways and opportunities within the state’s innovation ecosystems.
What is Next?
Helping Georgia’s emerging crop of cleantech startups with their workforce needs is the immediate next step. Current and near-future (2-3 years out) needs should be assessed as augmenting the talent development system takes time. The Georgia Cleantech Innovation Hub has engaged a number of informal conversations over the past year and heard some of the pain points, including those from:
- A cleantech solution deployment company that will need electricians and installers, but right now desperately needs the solution designers
- A technology transfer professional that needs business executives ready to step in and lead a hard tech startup in the utility industry through university spinout and early fundraising
- A cleantech startup founder looking for a sales leader that can make first sales, but also knows how to stand up a channel sales organization from scratch and fast.
There are a number of interventions the ecosystem can implement to fill these gaps (e.g. entrepreneur-in-residence programs, co-op and fellowship programs, and new certificate and degree programs to name a few), but the specificity and scale of the needs should be determined first.
How Do We Know When We Get There?
Pretty simply, when cleantech innovation work becomes mainstream. In a matter of years, the cleantech innovation ecosystem in Georgia went from having 10’s of people performing this work as a passion project, to having 100s of people making their cleantech passion a career. The cleantech innovation ecosystem will have “made it” when there are:
- 10,000s of people, working throughout the state,
- for whom their cleantech innovation job will be just a good job
- for which they were trained and
- that enables a fulfilling career in an industry that has a long-term growth trajectory.
Georgia has seen its workforce evolve many times over the past 60 years and can use the lessons learned to support growing a workforce primed for the growth industries of the next 50 years.
We hope that you have enjoyed this series of articles on Building a World-Class Cleantech Innovation Ecosystem in Georgia. It is certainly not all that will be written on this topic. There is still more to cover, like deep-dives on GA’s differentiated assets, the respective lanes of the players in our current ecosystem and more. If you like this please consider following us on LinkedIn, subscribing to our newsletter, or making a donation.