Advanced digital skills demands and priorities in wind energy sector

In a context of increasing digitalisation within the wind energy sector, the industry is facing a growing need for professionals with advanced digital skills, beyond traditional IT positions. As observed in other major transitions, educational institutions must adapt their curricula accordingly. Before recommending specific curricular updates, this study maps the demand for advanced digital skills in the wind industry using a mixed-method approach that combines expert interviews, survey data, and job-posting analysis. These complementary data sources are integrated to provide a comprehensive and holistic picture, by incorporating quantitative and qualitative data to overcome the usual bias of single-source analysis: job-postings provide a picture of the current labour market demands, surveys enable foresight perspectives, and interviews generate deeper qualitative insights. Interviews and job-postings are analysed using Natural Language Processing, enabling automated analyses that can be repeated in future years to track the evolution of the required skills, while qualitative analysis of the interviews provides additional contextual understanding. The triangulation of survey data, expert interviews, and job-posting analysis suggests a coherent picture of advanced digital skills priorities within the wind energy sector. Across all sources, scientific programming and numerical modelling consistently emerge as cornerstone competencies, while the prominence of machine learning, Internet of Things, and cybersecurity varies depending on organisational context and role requirements. Moreover, job-posting analysis shows that approximately 44% of engineering-related positions in the wind sector require advanced digital skills, while surveys and interviews indicate a broader range of emerging competencies, suggesting that the spectrum of required advanced digital skills is likely to expand in the near future. Interviews expand the analysis on skill gaps and lifelong learning needs, while the survey results also provide insights on preferred training formats. Together, these findings pave the way for a broader skill-gap analysis involving the curricula of educational institutions, with the aim of ultimately bridging this gap and supporting the upskilling and reskilling of wind-energy professionals.