A Better Strategy for Hiring Utility Analysts
The qualified applicants are gone now
If you’re reading this article, I assume I’ve already convinced you that your current shortage of utility energy analysts is real, intractable, and only getting worse. Your options are to 1) win a compensation war against Boston Consulting Group, 2) sponsor immigrant talent at a nadir of federal support for immigration,1 or 3) realize you can’t hire like it’s 2012 anymore.
If you’re not convinced, I made that case last week:
Talent is Oxygen, and We’re All Short of Breath
ISO New England (ISO-NE), the keeper of electricity markets in New England, has been running an ancillary market initiative called the Inventoried Energy Program. This program exists because in the winter, New England needs six billion cubic feet per day of natural gas but has the pipeline capacity for…five. In the Before Times, that shortfall would get…
You need a different solution—you need to hire bright people before richer and more glamorous competitors get to them, you need to keep them for 3-5 years, and you need to do this before everyone else gets wise to the new reality.
My mentor showed me a playbook for building a solid analytics team from scratch.2 I’ll lay it out for you, with some additional insight on whom you’re hiring. Because this playbook requires you to admit one terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad fact.
You Will Need to Hire Underqualified Zoomers
Maybe this is just my LinkedIn bubble, but I get the sense that many employers are still hiring like it’s their market: long must-have lists, extended interview processes, and conservative compensation packages—hybrid work counts for something, right?
Wrong.
Let’s go back to ISO New England: they want a “Resource Adequacy Engineer” with:
A quantitative Bachelor’s Degree (Master’s preferred)
Working knowledge of very specific electric grid dynamics (and simulations thereof)
Python chops
Knowledge of what FERC stands for.3
I figure they would offer $75k-85k (gross before benefits) for a sharp kid fresh out of a UMass Amherst undergrad program…and they’d lose to Akamai offering that kid $120k plus stock options to work on something something AI.
If you find a candidate who’s more than 80% qualified for your position, drop everything and hand them an offer letter. If they need an H1B to join, pay whatever it takes.
And when you get return to your desk, you must recognize that there is no “utility analyst” training pipeline full of eager Millennials. You have to build the talent pool yourself by hiring underbaked staff, training them yourself, and retaining them long enough to recoup your investment.
And that talent will have to come from Gen Z.
Gen Z, in a Nutshell
Get all stereotypes about Gen Z4 out of your head, and turn to Chapter 6 of Dr. Jean Twenge’s Generations, the only book about generational trends with real numbers behind it. Here’s what you need to know:
Gen Z grew up slow and cautious: We are slow to get licenses, slow to move out, and less likely to drink or party. If you’re hiring a Zoomer straight out of college, there’s good odds (Probable 55-80%) that you’re their first job. Assume they don’t know how an office works.
Gen Z aren’t lazy—we’re pessimists: The Zoomer zeitgeist assumes that everything sucks, that hard work doesn’t pay off, and that you, the boss, are waiting for the perfect moment to screw them over. If you give a Zoomer a why, they’ll endure a lot of how—but Gen Z trust is expensive and fragile.
Gen Z really is that neurotic: Anxiety, depression, loneliness, the works. It’s as bad as you think. This isn’t your job to fix, but this is what replaced Millennial narcissism. Just hold the mnemonic BPD (Be Perfect or Die), and you’ll understand the Zoomer ethos.
Don’t ask a Zoomer about politics: There are two points of origin for Gen Z politics: one motivated the worst excesses of woke culture, the other underpins the worst vulgarities of the MAGA movement.5 A given Zoomer is decently likely (Improbable 20-45%) to have a history of truly psychotic politics. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
Yes, this is a grim picture. No, Zoomers don’t know a hawk from a handsaw.6 But you need to work with what you got.7
Narrow Your Qualifications
This line of work doesn’t have a clear job title yet—resource planner, energy services analyst, integrated resource engineer, regulatory specialist—but when you’re hiring underqualified Zoomers, those intricacies don’t matter. I suggest narrowing your job descriptions down to two:
Quantitative Energy Analyst: Collect and process quantitative data (including meter reads, ISO/RTO and supplier reports, and external datasets) and figure out what the hell is going on. Deliver forecasts, system automations, and better ideas for the future of energy.
Qualitative Energy Analyst: Collect and process qualitative information (including public utility commission documents, regulatory paperwork, and customer feedback) and figure out what the hell is going on. Deliver grant applications, public-facing communications, and better ideas for the future of energy.
Both positions require, in my mentor’s words:
Analytical ability
Inquisitiveness
Enthusiasm8
Capacity to work within a team
The quantitative analyst will need a math, computer science, or engineering degree. The qualitative analyst could walk in with a business, political/social science, or even liberal arts degree.
I know your job description has other things on it. You’re not getting them. You have to train specific skills on the job.
Get To Them Before the Competition
Glassdoor is not enough. No student is aware that utilities, power supply aggregators, energy services companies, or power plant operators are places with jobs. You need to seek talent out.
Go to local college career fairs. Prioritize mid-tier schools.9 Schmooze the career services staff. Tell them you’ll take interns. Pay those interns the rate you used to pay entry-level staff. Pay fresh full-timers 15% more than that.
An Internship is Its Own Job Interview
An intern is so underqualified to do the job that they’re not even done with school. The resume will only tell you whether they’re quantitative or qualitative. The Zoom interview will only give you a preliminary vibe check. There’s nothing else to learn.
The real interview is paying this kid for three months and seeing how well they can collect information and figure out what the hell is going on. After the internship, you should know whether you can train this kid into the properly-qualified analyst you actually need. If you can, they need to know that you will hand them an offer the instant they get their diploma. Then, you’ll need to make a follow-up call:
You’re graduating in eight weeks, right? Awesome, can you start the week after that?
Make the intern do full-time analyst work. Give them ownership over a small project, and throw them to the wolves. So what if they don’t know how to apply for an EECBG grant or model ICAP and RNS savings for an energy storage system? You didn’t know how to do that in 2020, either. But if you give an intern agency, ownership, and a chance to grow, there’s a 1 in 6 shot they’ll come back full time.10
Befriend the University Staff
Professors and administrative staffers have a habit of “adopting” particularly promising students—these kids will do part-time gigs or capstone projects for the Office of Something-or-the-Other, or they’ll plug into some activist project, or they’ll simply build a reputation as a Kid Who’s Going Places.
These students are jackpot hires because they already have a track record for jumping into hard problems with insufficient experience and succeeding anyway. I pulled in one intern like this and they immediately distinguished themself as a rockstar in the office.
Train Them Yourself, and Keep Them for 3-5 Years
You want your analysts to have SCADA chops? Or project management skills? Or the guts to talk down an angry customer? Well, you’ll need to train them up yourself. This will require active management—scheduled weekly check-ins, informal passes by their desk, two-hour reality lowdowns, and an offer to shadow every meeting you can give them a chair for. It’ll be 6 months before they know what the basic words mean, a year before you can take the training wheels off, and 2-3 years before they match the job description you wanted to hire them for.
…But 2-3 years is right around when a sufficiently ambitious analyst starts looking for their next gig. You need that next gig to be a promotion at your shop. A pay bump, a shot at management, a project or two to own, a ticket to industry conferences, a chance to do things that mid-twenties young guns ordinarily wouldn’t do.
And you need to tell this to your fresh-faced hire during their first week on the job.
I hired you specifically for your capacity to grow. That growth will take three years. I want to keep you for at least five. Here’s a list of things to learn. Complete this, and I’ll guarantee you a promotion. Keep this list handy, because we will revisit it in six months. Your victory is in my interest.
Your freshly-hired underqualified Zoomer does not trust you. They expect you to overwork them, underpay them, and reward them with empty promises. They think they will never afford a house, that no one will respect them, that they are powerless against a burning world.
They yearn for purpose, for loyalty, for a future.
Give it to them.
…Because Great Talent is its Own Competitive Moat
Recently, I read an article about a Chinese AI model so good that it scares OpenAI. The founder, Liang Wenfeng, gave an interview describing how he did it. Unlike other Chinese or American shops, he’s not trying to commercialize the technology. Instead, his company Deepseek open-sourced their model, because anyone can copy the code, but no one can copy his team.
An AI commentator once called Deepseek a team of “inscrutable wizards,” but that’s not how Liang sees it. He just hires sharp kids—fresh graduates, PhD candidates, young guns with interesting backstories—and promises them free reign to do “hardcore innovation” 硬核创新 on the hardest problems possible. Liang hires for “passion and curiosity” 热爱和好奇心, for a love of the game beyond making money. Then, he sets these researchers loose: no hard job titles, no barriers to the compute cluster, and easy access to resources.
The electric utility industry doesn’t inscrutable wizards, per se. But we do have hard problems that need genuine innovation, and we are competing for talent against Big Tech, against climate nonprofits, against Greentown Labs. But if we build vibrant teams with diverse backgrounds and room to run, the energy in that corner of the office will pull new talent in and retain them long-term.
Because 3-5 years is the minimum—your management staff wants to retire someday, right?
This post and the information presented are intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of their current or previous employers or any elected officials. The author makes no recommendations toward any electric utility, regulatory body, or other organization. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author has not independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author assumes no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.
In an ideal world, I’d recommend making as many H1B hires as you can, but between the lottery system, application fees, and legal assistance, you’re looking at $8,000 for a one-in-three shot at successfully pulling a candidate through the visa process. At those numbers, the risk-adjusted cost of hiring an H1B employee is equivalent to comping an existing employee’s state-school MBA.
He used this playbook to hire me—“make of that what you will,” he’d say.
“FERC,, MAH CHEEZBURGER FELLED ON TEH GROUND!!!”
Zoomers, colloquially
The politics of the past decade has been 4chan teens vs. Tumblr teens. The politics of the next decade will be 4chan dads vs. Tumblr moms. I can elaborate on request.
Given what I’ve just said about Zoomers, remember that enthusiasm is not necessarily cheerful. Revolutionary fervor counts.
Less competition, plus lower risk of Ivy-plus elite brain-poisoning.
I ran the intern program at my previous employer. Out of 13 interns, two came back full-time.
Lol
热爱和好奇心
Passion is literally "hot love" for your work