Guest post by: By Taha Bawa, CEO & Co-Founder, Goodwall, & Riad Meddeb, Head of Decarbonization and Sustainable development at UNDP

When we talk about the energy transition, the conversation tends to focus on technology, infrastructure and investment. But another piece of the puzzle deserves just as much attention: do we have the next generation of people ready to deliver it?

By 2030, 1.2 billion young people globally will enter the workforce. Fewer than 60% are projected to have the skills the green economy will need. That gap won’t close itself, and certainly not through infrastructure spending alone. It closes through deliberate investment in people – and, crucially, by giving young people a clear line of sight between acquiring skills and turning those skills into a viable, sustainable career.

Over the past year, UNDP and the global youth platform Goodwall set out to test what happens when that line of sight is made visible. Through the NextGen Energy Champions initiative, we reached more than 58,000 young people across more than 100 countries with a free, mobile-first sustainable energy course – from Kenya to the Philippines, India to Costa Rica, Haiti to Papua New Guinea. Participants learned the fundamentals of clean energy, tested their understanding, and were invited to post a short video on what sustainable energy means for their own community.

The data showed that young people are interested in joining the clean-energy economy. Among post-programme survey respondents, 93% expressed an interest in a clean-energy career, while 92% chose at least one concrete next step.

The voices from the programme make the point better than any statistic. A young woman in Zambia wants her government to invest in turning agricultural waste into energy. A participant in Kenya, already training as an electrical technician, wants to specialise in wind-turbine maintenance because his region is mountainous and windy.

While the appetite for a clean-energy career was high, the post-programme survey also showed that many lack a clear understanding of the careers available to them. Fewer than half (48%) of the 5,078 participants who completed the programme quiz knew that most clean-energy jobs are not engineering roles. Only 57% correctly answered a question about the projected scale of clean-energy job creation by 2050, making employment and career pathways the two weakest areas of knowledge measured by the programme.

Clearly, young people are already interested, ambitious and ready to act. The gap is between that ambition and a visible route into opportunity. Too many young people still do not know how broad the sector is, which skills employers need or how to turn an initial learning experience into a recognised credential, practical experience and, ultimately, a livelihood.

Skills programmes succeed or fail on whether governments, employers and investors build the apprenticeships, entry-level roles and public-sector pathways that give a completed course somewhere to go.

Career awareness, accessible training and clear progression routes must be treated as essential infrastructure for the energy transition. Investment in technology is redundant without investment in the generation who will build, operate and improve it.

This is the conversation UNDP and Goodwall will bring to New York this September. At the UN General Assembly, we are convening senior leaders from government, energy, industry, finance and philanthropy for ‘Powering the Future: Sparking the Next Generation of Energy Talent’, a roundtable sharing these insights for the first time in public.

Our aim is to turn the data into commitments: practical routes to hands-on training at scale, clearer pathways from entrepreneurship to engineering to public-sector careers, and the partnerships needed to fund them.

The infrastructure of the energy transition is being built. The question this data puts to policymakers, employers and funders gathering at UNGA is whether the workforce to run it is being built just as deliberately – and just as urgently.

The data here is a useful corrective to a persistent assumption that young people need to be convinced of the case for a career in clean energy. They don’t. What they need is somebody to open the door.