Workforce Innovation

Feature

It's Not Easy Being Green

On the heels of the dot-com bust, Silicon Valley is once again growing, due in part to a new regional emphasis on clean technologies. “Cleantech,” as it is known, consists of such sectors as green building technologies and alternative energies, including solar and biofuels. The construction trades are deeply involved in the business locally, with the building and upgrading of structures to better access clean technologies with greater use of solar panels and eco-friendly building materials. Cleantech has experienced great expansion over the past decade with growth rates of over 30 percent a year. Germany and Japan have led this expansion, with the United States—driven by California—currently the third largest country in terms of cleantech development.

The venture capital community, which has been a catalyst for invention and development in Silicon Valley for decades, sees value in this latest focus as well and has invested heavily into many of the startups established that focus on clean technologies. According to a recent article in the Washington Times, “Venture capital investment in Silicon Valley reached $1.7 billion” in the first three quarters of 2006—an amount five times what it had been only two years earlier. A Business Wire article also recently stated that the solar photovoltaics (solar panel) sector is expected to grow from the current $15.6 billion market to $69.3 billion in 2016.

Despite California’s leadership position in cleantech innovation and implementation and a nurturing environment for industry start-ups, the impending mass retirement of the Baby Boom generation and the current lack of career and technical education (CTE) will soon combine to create a situation in which cleantech businesses and utility companies will have a number of critical job openings that will be difficult to fill. These workforce issues must be addressed in order to ensure that the region’s status as a global leader in the budding cleantech industry is assured.

Community college leaders in the region recently gathered to discuss the challenges educational institutions are facing in addressing new workforce needs in Silicon Valley, including new ways to provide training for those who want to enter the emerging cleantech sectors. The Palo Alto Daily News stated that “new energy workforce training programs might be developed by the University of California and state college systems, but community colleges are the perfect vehicle for this kind of training due to their ability to nimbly respond to technological changes.” The educational systems that serve Silicon Valley operate in much the same way that they did several decades ago and are not entirely effective in responding to the needs of today’s market. These systems must adapt to better reflect the constantly evolving needs of the region’s employers in order for the region to remain competitive internationally.

Working Partnerships USA, a nonprofit public policy and research organization, published a study this year indicating that with the evaporation of middle class jobs within Santa Clara County, the ability for middle-class families to maintain a living is becoming increasingly difficult. Cleantech provides an opportunity to counteract this in its creation of a significant number of new job opportunities—many appropriate for the traditional middle-class—but only if the region can step up to the challenge of supporting this burgeoning industry.

Silicon Valley has the knowledge, the experience, and the capital to drive the industry forward and access this vast and growing market opportunity, but industry insiders agree that without the skilled workers—both engineers and technicians—the region will not be able to fully capitalize on this invaluable opportunity.