(P16) Building a Strong Workforce Pipeline to Support a Powerful Blue Economy

Due to the nascent stage of the marine energy industry, there isn’t currently a steady flow of research, funding, or jobs in this sector, however the PBE initiative anticipates a need for significant workforce growth. Given the need for more research, development, and demonstration of marine energy technologies, this industry needs a workforce that mixes strong ocean construction, nautical design, and ocean science with understanding of advanced materials, innovative power system development, and control theory. Additionally, the industry needs to recruit social scientists to perform economic evaluations of the technology and influence policy to reduce deployment barriers. In partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Technology Office, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Hydropower Foundation have been working to help grow the marine energy workforce of the future by strengthening the STEM workforce pipeline.
Our work has included deep engagement of the marine energy industry and academia to understand their challenges. We have also sought student perspectives on the marine energy industry and availability of educational courses. We have found that there is strong student interest in marine energy, but less awareness of what the industry has to offer and how to pursue a career. Professors often struggle to have sufficient funding to integrate marine energy into their curricula or research, creating a feedback loop where students are not getting exposed to marine energy in school. To address these challenges, our work has focused on improving program accessibility of educational materials (primarily across the university through postgraduate levels) and increasing awareness of marine energy as a renewable energy career. Our efforts have also served to increase the level of public knowledge on career opportunities in these sectors. Our work has focused on the development of a publicly available web portal to house information on the marine energy workforce, educational resources, research, prizes, competitions, networking and career building on the STEM for PRIMRE web portal: https://openei.org/wiki/PRIMRE/STEM. Our poster will present our research findings from industry, academia, and students as well as highlight the educational resources that have been developed to address the challenges.