Water’s skills shortage is about adaptability as much as numbers, IWA panel hears

The UK water sector needs about 44,000 new people by 2030, as around 16% of its workforce retires, the chief executive of the Institute of Water told a session on the skills shortage at the IWA World Water Congress in Glasgow. Across utilities as a whole, more than 300,000 new people will be needed, she said.

But the panel argued that headcount is only part of the problem. “The skills that we teach people today, are not necessarily going to carry them through their, say, 40 odd year career,” she said, urging the sector to “move away from thinking of education as an upfront thing and more to a lifelong learning thing”. The capabilities she singled out were adaptability, curiosity, resourcefulness, collaboration, and leadership at every level rather than only in management roles.

Leadership tops the gap

Co-chair Brian McIntosh of the International Water Centre at Griffith University in Brisbane said “skills are vitally important”, but “skills are not the whole picture”: utilities also need the organisational capabilities that turn individual skills into reliable services. He pointed to a Water Services Association of Australia study in which leadership was the most-cited skill gap, at 18% of respondents, ahead of digital literacy, critical thinking and customer centricity.

Critical thinking is becoming more urgent with AI, he said. A collaborator at a Brisbane utility had asked him what universities could do about “AI slop” — unreviewed AI output finding its way into documents.

Reform and engineering

Aaron Burton, who works on water reform at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said the government faces “a massive challenge ahead of us to transform the water sector in the UK”. Plans to replace between 9 and 25 different water plans with two planning frameworks will need new skills in nature-based solutions, optimisation and environmental economics. Around two hundred staff from other sectors have joined the reform work, and an introductory course with a professional institute gives them a common baseline, he said.

Bill Becker, a vice-president of US water consultancy Hazen and Sawyer, said the bulk of the sector’s spending goes on ageing pipes and plants rather than headline issues such as PFAS: “the vast amount of that money is in basic infrastructure”. Universities have lost much of their research in fundamentals such as filtration, he said. “I think critical thinking is often lacking in a lot of students that come out of school today.” His firm hires strong graduates and trains them through its own academy, and he suggested universities bring in practitioners and rethink how tenure rewards research.

From the start of a career

Celina Zhang, a civil engineer at Arup four years into her career, said her team expects 10% to 20% growth, but many applicants come from geography or transport rather than water. She credited her PhD supervisor at Cranfield University with refusing to tell her what to do and insisting she arrive with options — the habit, she said, that consultancy clients pay for. Arup expects 70% of learning to come from daily work, 20% from self-learning and 10% from external courses, she said.

Recorded with the organiser’s permission at the IWA World Water Congress, Glasgow, 6 October 2026.

Written with AI assistance from the session recording. Every quotation was checked against the recording; filler words and repetitions were removed. Approved for publication by Bill Gray.