| By Olivia Rudgard and Akshat Rathi What does a country need to be self-sufficient? Natural resources, for sure. Land, to grow things, and critical minerals to mine. And people. Lots, and lots of people. Onshoring – the practice of bringing your technical and trade jobs home, is in vogue. Trump says he wants Americans making the goods that they buy, rather than relying on imports. He also wants Americans learning technical skills, rather than studying at Ivy League universities. Among Harvard University’s many sins, according to comments in a TV interview by Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt, is that it produces too many “LGBTQ graduate majors" and not enough plumbers and electricians. Listen: Labor Shortages Are Holding Back Desperately Needed Electrification Members of Keir Starmer’s center-left UK Labour Party might not be so openly hostile to higher education, but some of them are singing a similar tune. One Labour MP, Dan Carden, wrote in the Daily Mail last month that universities were producing “an endless stream of graduates for email jobs and human resources” – rather than the technical skills needed for Britain to become a hub for manufacturing. Britain was once an industrial powerhouse, but a much smaller share of workers are employed in manual jobs now than three decades ago. Scarred by its recent experience of crippling energy price spikes after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is increasingly fearful of too much reliance on imports. “Energy independence” is the oft-repeated promise of Ed Miliband, the party’s climate and energy chief, as he pushes the country towards a grid more reliant on wind, solar and batteries than gas and coal. To both these ends, massive battery factories, lithium mines and an ambitious heat pump rollout are in the works. But staffing is a problem. A lack of qualified installers is the main thing holding back its ambitions to dominate the nascent but growing home heat pump market, executives from Octopus Energy told us in our story published today as the Big Take. Two enormous battery factories meant to supply Britain’s car industry, one of the few domestic industries it retains, need thousands of staff by 2030. Tens of thousands of automotive jobs are at stake if it can’t be done. In the US, a lack of skilled workers is driving up the cost of utilities.  A trainer shows a newly installed heat pump system at the Octopus Energy Ltd.'s R&D center in Slough, UK in September 2021. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg Both countries are looking to their own populations to plug this gap. In the UK, a recently-announced program to fund apprenticeships for “priority sectors” including builders working on retrofitting homes, also hiked the sponsorship fees companies must pay to hire workers from abroad. And companies themselves are getting creative, by hiring workers from parallel industries like food production, launching their own apprenticeships and moving essential workers from place to place when needed. Neither government is actively looking at the one way you can get new people quickly – increased immigration. And it’s not something companies are keen to publicly push for, either. “In this moment, in this administration, companies are not talking about immigration policy. In fact, they're running away from the topic of immigration policy,” says Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute. That is likely to make the challenge harder, especially because international students gravitate toward exactly the technical fields that might make them useful employees in Trump’s newly self-sufficient America. Some 56% opted for STEM courses last year, making them overrepresented in science and technical classrooms. Overall just 20% of American graduates received a STEM degree in 2020, compared to over 40% in China. And the disparity continues beyond the classroom. Foreign-born workers make up 19% of all those in science-related fields and 43% of doctorate-level scientists and engineers. In the US, international students have become targets in Trump’s attacks on the Ivy League. The government is pausing new visas for international students and says it will cancel Chinese student visas. In the UK international student numbers are falling, in part because government immigration crackdowns have introduced restrictions like preventing students from bringing their families. All this means that the workforce of the future (whether green or otherwise), which can free both countries from reliance on imports, must come from the domestic population, where there is little existing expertise in technical fields like battery formulation. “It’s an arms race, and if we want to get in the arms race, we’ve got to open these giga plants, energy storage, etcetera” says Colin Herron, a professor at Newcastle University who has been coordinating training for UK battery factories. “But we’re going to have to do it with the people we’ve got now.” Today’s story is the second in Bloomberg Green’s new Bottlenecks series, which explores the lesser known obstacles standing in the way of our electrified future. Read the first part on how a shortage of transformers is threatening electricity supply on Bloomberg.com. | 
