Grid operators have no shortage of substation projects on the books. What they're short of is the engineers who can commission them. Protection and control (P&C) engineering, the discipline responsible for relay settings, fault detection, and the systems that keep a substation from taking down the grid around it, has become one of the hardest roles in power delivery to fill.
The numbers back up what recruiters have been hearing directly from clients all year: substation hiring isn't just tight, it's structurally behind demand, and the gap is widening faster than training pipelines can close it.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy's 2025 United States Energy and Employment Report, 89% of construction employers in the transmission, distribution, and storage sector reported at least some difficulty finding qualified workers. That sector alone employs close to 1.5 million people in the US, at a median wage of just under $60,000, and the hiring friction is showing up across every level of the workforce, from field technicians to licensed engineers.
Protection and control sits at the sharpest end of that shortage. Employers hiring for P&C roles typically want 8 to 12 years of utility-specific experience, an active Professional Engineer license, NERC compliance knowledge, and hands-on proficiency with relay platforms like Schweitzer or GE Multilin. That's a narrow talent pool to begin with, and it's shrinking. Industry estimates put the average time to fill a qualified protection and control engineer role at 90 to 120 days, well beyond what most project timelines can absorb without knock-on delays.
A few forces are compounding at once.
Retirements are outpacing new entrants. Grid-related professions are seeing retirements outnumber new hires by a ratio of roughly 1.7 to 1, according to workforce data cited in recent industry reporting. The engineers with 20-plus years of relay experience, the people who trained the next generation, are leaving faster than replacements are coming up.
Apprenticeship pipelines haven't scaled with demand. The transmission and distribution sector needs to grow active apprenticeships from around 45,000 in 2024 to roughly 65,000 per year just to keep pace with expected workforce needs. That's a significant jump, and most training programs are still catching up to the target.
Load growth is pulling forward substation build-out. Data center expansion, industrial electrification, and renewable interconnection queues are all driving new substation and switchyard construction at the same time. Every one of those projects needs P&C engineering before it can be commissioned, and the queue of qualified engineers hasn't grown at anywhere near the same rate.
Compensation competition has intensified. Data center developers are now bidding directly against traditional utilities and EPCs for substation designers and protection engineers, often with faster hiring timelines and more aggressive packages. That's good news for candidates and a real complication for employers used to competing only within the utility sector.
Some utilities are responding directly. Duke Energy's 2024-2028 workforce development plan, filed with the North Carolina Utilities Commission, calls for 1,200 new skilled trades positions and 400 new engineering roles by the end of 2026, a signal that large utilities see this as a multi-year structural issue rather than a temporary blip.
For utilities, EPCs, and developers trying to staff substation and switchyard work right now, a few practical shifts are worth considering.
Requiring 8 to 12 years of utility-specific P&C experience for every opening shrinks an already small pool. Some employers are having success building structured mentorship paths that pair mid-career engineers (5 to 8 years) with senior relay specialists, rather than holding out exclusively for fully seasoned hires.
In a market where qualified P&C candidates are fielding multiple offers, a slow internal approval process is often the real reason a role stays open past 120 days. Employers who can compress interview-to-offer timelines are winning candidates that a strictly by-the-book process would lose.
Since Schweitzer and GE Multilin proficiency is a recurring bottleneck, employers investing in in-house or vendor-led relay training are expanding their internal pipeline instead of relying solely on the external market.
If substation designers and P&C engineers are fielding offers from data center developers, comparing compensation only against traditional utility scales risks losing candidates to a sector with a very different pay structure and timeline.
The substation protection and control shortage isn't a temporary blip tied to one project cycle. It's the product of a retiring workforce, an apprenticeship pipeline that hasn't scaled, and new demand sources competing for the same narrow pool of qualified engineers. Utilities and contractors that adapt their hiring approach now, rather than waiting for the pipeline to catch up on its own, will be the ones keeping substation projects on schedule through the rest of this decade.
InfraRec works across transmission, distribution, and substation recruitment, connecting utilities, EPCs, and developers with the protection and control engineers, substation designers, and project leadership needed to keep grid projects moving. If your team is feeling the P&C hiring crunch, our client services team can help you build a faster, more targeted search. Browse our current open roles or learn more about our approach to clean energy and infrastructure recruitment.
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