The Role Nobody Talks About. Until a Project Stops

Most operations teams can have everything in place. The capital, the contracts, and the equipment, but without a Senior Authorised Person (SAPs) on site, every other investment on that project is sitting idle. You already know they are difficult to find; what you don't know is that you’ve been looking for them the wrong way.

The real point of friction right now is the availability of SAPs. Since essential safety sign-offs and legal rules can’t proceed without an SAP on-site, the shortage has moved from a hiring hurdle to a major threat that can stall entire programmes.

That is exactly what is happening across the UK energy sector right now. And the evidence is no longer observational.

 

Three Government Sources. One Consistent Warning

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero explicitly names SAPs as a persistent skills gap in offshore wind, alongside data analysts and regulators.

The report also confirms what hiring managers already feel. The reality is that every sector, from solar to nuclear, is fighting for the same authorised engineers. This cross-industry competition has created a huge spike in demand for a group of people that just isn't growing at a fast enough rate. The projects that move forward are the ones that secured their delivery teams early, ensuring they hit their deadlines without the risk of costly delays.

DESNZ Unlooping Electricity Network Connections Research

The lack of SAPs is even being experienced residentially. The rollout of heat pumps and EV charging infrastructure is being delayed across millions of UK homes.

The shortage of SAPs, line workers, and jointers has become a serious bottleneck for DNOs. To make matters worse, different departments are often competing against each other for the same people. It’s reached a point where DNOs are calling it a major operational risk, making it clear that we need a joint effort between operators and training bodies to address the gap.

Right now, 3.9 million homes are waiting on a transition that’s being held up by a single, critical shortage. SAPs have become the primary bottleneck, and since it takes years to train new ones, the delay isn't going away anytime soon.

 

 

Energy UK. Building the Future Energy Workforce 

The UK government estimates that we need 400,000 additional clean energy jobs by 2030, doubling the current workforce. Critically, 80% of the projected 2030 workforce may already be in work today, meaning the pipeline cannot be built from scratch.

Training takes time. An electrician apprenticeship typically runs four years. For a Senior Authorised Person, the pathway from entry-level electrical work to full HV authorisation is considerably longer, requiring accumulated site experience and assessed competency. That process cannot be shortcut, the jobs need to exist now, the people do not.

The talent pool is fixed in the short term and the qualification pathway is multi-year. Every organisation competing for the same authorised persons is simply redistributing an existing cohort, not growing it. When one DNO loses 30 jointers to contractors in ten months, those workers did not materialise from nowhere. They came from somewhere else in the market.

 

What to do instead

The organisations that will win on SAP talent over the next five years are not those spending the most on recruitment. They are the ones treating workforce development as an infrastructure investment.

Build your own pipeline deliberately. Identify electricians and HV workers within your existing workforce who have the foundational competency to progress toward SAP authorisation. Assess the gap between where they are and what full authorisation requires. Most clean energy roles will need to be filled from the existing workforce. Over 90% of the UK's oil and gas workforce already has skills with medium to high transferability to adjacent energy sectors. The same principle applies internally within your own organisation.

 

Partner with training providers before you have a vacancy

By the time a role is open, it is too late to build the person you need. Relationships with specific training bodies need to exist before demand becomes undeniable. Organisations that engage early will have an advantage when training cohorts become available.

 

 

Treat retention as a primary metric 

The SAPs you currently employ are your most valuable and most portable assets. Having career pathway visibility, continued professional development, and genuine recognition are direct risk mitigations against the competitor who will approach your team next quarter with a higher rate.

Use specialist technical recruitment strategically, not reactively

Contract SAP professionals have a legitimate role in bridging project demand while permanent pipelines develop. But that works best when managed through a specialist recruitment partner with genuine market depth and live relationships across the authorised person community.

How VHR can help

VHR has spent over two decades recruiting for highly technical industries. That experience has given us a massive network in energy, particularly for those hard-to-find roles that are currently stalling project pipelines.

We know which SAPs are open to a conversation, what's anchoring them to their current role, and what it takes to make them move. That intelligence comes from the relationships we’ve built over the years in this space, allowing us to uncover specialist capacity that isn’t visible on the open market.

If you have a live requirement or a project coming online in the next 12 months, speak to one of our specialist recruiters before the window closes.