# Turning Cool Concepts into Careers - The Cleantech Jobs Boom

**Panel overview**

In this session, part of the Everything Electric show in Sydney, Tom Gan brought together Chelle Norris (founder and CEO of Found Power), Chris Briggs (program head of energy futures at the Institute for Sustainable Futures), Chris Hunt (co-founder of a hardware company building products for the fossil-to-renewables transition, Cuprous), and Mick Liubinskas (CEO of Climate Salad, a group representing 850 Australian climate technology companies) to discuss job creation in electrification and clean tech.

**Trades are the biggest shortfall**

Briggs said the top three skill shortages, according to a TAFE excellence centre he spoke with, are electricians, electricians, and electricians. The Power Skills Organisation's Job Skills Council estimated a need for 42,000 additional electricians by 2030 two years ago; two years later, it revised that up by another 30,000. His team's bottom-up survey of residential electrification installers found three main trades involved: electricians, plumbers (needed for hot water retrofits despite political concern about job losses there), and HVAC technicians.

**EV charging jobs skew toward maintenance, not construction**

A separate survey of EV charging installers found about 30% of the work is in building charging infrastructure and 70% is ongoing operation and maintenance, a different split from large-scale renewables projects. Construction-side roles include construction managers and electricians; on the maintenance side, level-three chargers also require telecommunications technicians. Briggs flagged heavy-duty trucking as a harder transition: existing diesel mechanics and auto electricians (who currently work only up to 24 volts) will need reskilling or a defined pathway into electric truck maintenance.

**Building a workforce that doesn't all look the same**

Norris argued that workforce diversity comes from letting people be visibly authentic rather than masking who they are. She described attending the Female Leadership and Innovation Program at Newcastle University, an all-women cohort where mothers openly stepped away to breastfeed, and said the experience made her realise how much of herself she'd been hiding as "a business owner." She's a new mother, neurodivergent, not an engineer, and a career changer, and she credits her neurodivergence directly with the cross-sector thinking (tourism, energy, mobility) that led to Found Power's business model.

**Defining climate tech broadly**

Liubinskas described climate tech as any scalable solution across four areas: emissions reduction, emissions removal, adaptation and resilience, and biodiversity and natural capital, spanning five sectors he summarised as powering, growing, making, moving, and cooling. He noted Australia developed foundational solar technology but historically failed to commercialise it, and argued the country is roughly 50 years behind and needs to move quickly to capture the jobs this time.

**Career changers without technical backgrounds**

Hunt, who spent 40 years in software engineering before moving into clean tech, said the hardest part of the transition wasn't a skills gap since his technical background transferred directly, but rebuilding a professional network in an unfamiliar industry. His first project in the sector was building an EV charger despite not being able to spell "EV" at the time. Liubinskas said people frequently reach out to Climate Salad assuming they need an environmental science degree, when the sector actually needs accountants, lawyers, and marketers to solve what are, in his framing, ordinary manufacturing and efficiency problems.

**Chelle Norris's path to founding Found Power**

Norris taught herself CSS and HTML at 13, started a law degree at 16, later completed a science degree, and spent around 10 years in technology roles with Salesforce partners and Adobe. In 2020 she developed a seizure condition and medically retired from her career. While renting out her cottage and hiring camper vans on weekends, she couldn't find an electric camper van to rent, and started Found Power after attending a conference on vehicle-to-grid technology.

**Government's role and structural imbalance**

Briggs said decades of steering students toward professional degrees over trades has left apprentice numbers flat or declining even as demand scales sharply, and argued fixing the trade pipeline is the top government priority. He also said clear transition pathways don't yet exist for diesel mechanics and auto electricians moving into EV-adjacent trades, or for school leavers entering the sector, and pointed to engineers as another category facing a similar shortfall.

**Manufacturing hardware in Australia**

Hunt said the biggest barrier is perception, not cost: people assume local manufacturing isn't viable because Australia lacks the concentrated supplier networks of somewhere like Shenzhen, but his company manufactures and develops its hardware and software domestically. He said the economics depend heavily on product and margin, and are hardest for high-volume, low-cost items. Liubinskas added that ARENA launched a $500,000 program that week for early-stage manufacturers, alongside a $5 billion net-zero fund from the National Reconstruction Fund being deployed over three years, arguing the funding gap is closing and the remaining obstacle is ideas plus willingness to build.

**Will EVs cost mechanics their jobs**

Asked whether EVs' simpler mechanics threaten automotive jobs, Briggs said the work is genuinely less labour-intensive per vehicle, and predicted local diesel truck manufacturing and retrofitting will shrink as larger overseas manufacturers enter the market, but said workers with those skills are already being absorbed elsewhere given the broader trade shortage. Hunt said most service centres currently don't know how to diagnose EV faults and often write off fixable problems, calling it an opening for mechanics willing to retrain. Norris compared the shift to the move from saddlers to mechanics after cars replaced horses: the job changes form but doesn't disappear.

**New roles that didn't exist a decade ago**

Asked for examples, Norris cited Amber Electric's "head of V2G" role, which she said wouldn't have existed in Australia ten years ago. Liubinskas pointed to a company called Vow Foods, which employs a "food inventor" role. Liubinskas put current Australian climate tech employment at around 12,000 jobs, with his organisation projecting growth to 100,000 by 2035 counting only Australian-developed and commercialised innovation, and predicted several Australian climate tech companies will surpass Canva's scale within that period.

**A dissenting note from the audience**

In the final question, an audience member raised Queensland's decision to reverse planned bus electrification in favour of continued diesel buses, alongside a crackdown on e-bikes and a preference for a gun buyback scheme over incentives for electric transport, questioning how political decisions shape which training pathways and courses are funded.