What employees do solar installers want?

SJSU has finished the first in its series of solar employer surveys. Recently, Prof. Meg Virick presented an hour summary of the insights gained into what employers want, in a one-hour webinar hosted by SolarTech that attracted 42 listeners.

In February and March, we surveyed 52 solar installers, and heard back from 32 of them. Of the respondents, 12.5% also manufacture their own products their own manufacturing. While 100% sell PV, 25% do solar hot water and some also did concentrated solar power, solar cooling or cool roofs.

Overall Trends

From the HR managers, 2011 is shaping up to be a much better year than 2010. Last year, 22% of the companies downsized and 28% increased. This year, 56% expect to increase with a median staffing increase of around 13%.

We asked these companies about both their overall staffing needs, and then focused specifically on sales people.

Excluding sales, the most popular job category was installers — half the companies were hiring installers, at an average of 10 installers each. Other major job categories are technician, electrician, project manager and engineer. (However, the technician stats were skewed by one company planning to hire 100 workers here.)

Recruiting Sales People

The survey asked installers what sales positions they were most interested in hiring one of six categories:

• Entry Level Sales (Residential)
• Mid-Level Sales (Residential or Commercial)
• Senior Salesperson (Residential or Commercial)
• Inside Sales

The most popular job listings were mid-level jobs, both residential and commercial.

As with other scientific research on staffing, the survey asked about knowledge, skills and experience. Some knowledge and skills were similar between the two most common jobs, but others varied dramatically.

Common to both types of jobs was knowledge of general solar industry concepts and (to a lesser degree) utility rate analysis and an understanding of the technology.
For residential sales, by far the most important knowledge was of sales and marketing concepts. The most important skills were speaking, social perceptiveness, active listening and persuasion.

For commercial sales, employers really wanted system sizing and costing knowledge, with system performance second. The desired skills were critical thinking, complex problem solving and judgement/decision making.

Employers also painted a very different view of compensation: The average residential sales rep had 60% contingent pay (i.e. commission) vs. 20% for commercial. At least one company gave its residential sales reps no base pay, while another gave commercial reps 95% base pay.

Interpretation

As a former biz dev guy, my personal opinion is that the surveys presented two different (and internally consistent) pictures.

The residential salesperson has to be good at personal selling a consumer durable. This would be also true for real estate, cars, electronics or other consumer durables. Given the nature of the business, it’s important to close the sale and move on.

In contrast, the commercial salesperson is managing a solution sale. His or her responsibility is to understand the customer’s needs and pick a unique solution (likely in the millions of dollars) to meet the firm’s needs. The sales rep builds trust over time through competence and responsiveness to those needs, and likely puts several person-days or person-weeks into scoping the sale.

For More Information

The slides and a complete video of our April 19 presentation are available online at the SJSU Solar Workforce website.

SJSU will be summarizing the survey in detail as part of our year-end report that will be posted to the website.

The pulse of solar employers

At the Solar Workforce Project, we have two main tasks over the next two years: developing curriculum for white collar workers and systematically contacting employers to understand their workforce needs.

Right now, the HR task is front and center. Dr. Meghna Virick, associate professor of HR Management, is in charge of contacting the HR managers, while I’ve taken responsibility for building a database of solar employers (aided by a bevy of student assistants.)

We plan to use multiple methods to provide a convergent picture of solar workforce needs. Survey responses from a representative sample of California solar employers will allow for scientific inferences to be drawn for the entire state, while interviews with selected employers will help us understand the “why” and “how” that are hard to capture in a survey. Of course, any results that we release must protect the confidentiality expectations of our respondents.

The big push over the past month has been to build the employer database, starting with the Bay Area and expanding statewide. We began with several lists, and then added and deleted companies as we learned more.

The database will include a wide range of companies, including manufacturers (wafers, panels, modules, balance of system) — whether their manufacturing is in California or elsewhere — as well as installers/integrators, PPA operators, equipment providers and others that play a role in the industry. There is no upper or lower limit on the size of the company, and we are also including foreign companies that have their US HQ in California.

I am personally classifying the companies for their role in the solar value chain, in case we later need to do a survey of integrators or thin film manufacturers. We may also need to go back and clean up the classification — for example, to segregate “pure play” firms (like Skyline, SolarCity, or Solyndra) from companies where solar is only part of the portfolio (like Applied Materials, Areva or National Semi.)

Building an accurate database has turned out to be a far more daunting effort than we’d imagined — not to get the company names, but to identify a qualified HR professional to contact with our questions. (At a very small company, the HR manager is the president or owner.)

Our urgent priority is sending about 45 HR students into the field to interview the HR managers. Prof. Lauren Ramsay has graciously loaned us her Workforce Planning, Staffing, and Training class to conduct the interviews. Our hope is not only to understand local employer staffing needs, but also to help train future HR professionals to understand a growing cleantech industry — both from their own research, and from what the class learns as a group.

Later in 2010 or early in 2011, we plan to start our quarterly employer surveys to address questions of interest to SolarTech and other members of the state-funded SolarTech Workforce Innovations Collaborative. These surveys will be analyzed, and the results reported here, at the SolarTech or SWIC website, and eventually in academic research.

If any employer has questions about our survey — or wants to volunteer to join — they should contact Meg or me with any questions or ideas.

Photo: Dr. Meghna Virick, from her official college web page.