Hire the power station's people after their last shift, not before it
Employers building the new grid are tempted to recruit coal station workers as early as they can. I argue that start dates should follow the closure, that new employers should pay for skills assessment while people are still employed and that the waiting cost belongs in the builder's budget.
I think the companies building Australia's new transmission lines and renewable projects are making a quiet mistake with the workforces of closing coal-fired stations. We need their electricians, fitters and control technicians, and we need them early. So we offer jobs early, and the most mobile and least entitled people accept. My position is that a new-build employer should make conditional offers well before a closure but set start dates after each person's last shift, pay for skills assessment while people are still employed at the station, and carry the cost of waiting in its own budget rather than passing it to the worker.
This is not an argument that closing generators or governments have no responsibilities. They have many, and some closing owners have handled them carefully. It is an argument about the lever that the hiring employer holds. Retraining programmes and transition authorities matter, but they mostly act after a closure. The choices that decide whether experienced people move into network work are made months earlier, by employers like mine, when we decide when a job begins.
What an early offer asks a station worker to give up
A long-serving employee at a closing station usually has a redundancy entitlement under an enterprise agreement or a closure arrangement, and for someone with twenty years' service it can exceed a year's pay. They also often have accrued leave, a retention payment for staying until the end and a superannuation position they understand. An employee who resigns to take another job before the closure date normally walks away from at least the redundancy component. An early offer therefore asks them to pay a large sum for the privilege of joining us sooner.
Some accept, because the offer is good or because they fear the market will be crowded later. The people who accept early tend to be younger, with shorter service and smaller entitlements. The experienced electricians and control technicians we most want are the ones who rationally wait. When we then fail to recruit them, we tell ourselves the workforce was unwilling to move. In fact we priced the move so that only some of them could afford it.
At Pennardine in 2023 we needed about 600 additional substation and line workers for two projects starting in 2024. A coal-fired station owned by another generator was due to close in mid-2025. Our project directors wanted station staff on site in 2024, and they were right that our need peaked then. I argued against immediate starts. We made conditional offers in 2024 with start dates on the day after each person's last shift, and we bridged our own gap with labour hire.
Paying for the wait
The bridge cost us A$6.8 million over about ten months, a little more than our chief financial officer had estimated. That is a real cost for a contractor whose margins are measured in single digits, and I do not want to understate it. Our board asked whether it was a cost we should have passed to clients. Some of it was recovered through contract variations, but most was not, and I think it should sit with the builder. We were the party that wanted the people, and we were the party that gained most from their experience.
The return was not only goodwill. We assessed 222 station employees, made 181 conditional offers and saw 167 start. A year after the closure 152 remained with us, a retention rate well above that of our general recruitment. Forty-one of them had qualified in substation roles that had previously taken us two years to fill. Mining companies recruiting from the same station made immediate offers with higher pay, and some of the station's people went to them. Several came to us later, saying that our offer had been the only one that did not ask them to choose between a job and their redundancy.
We also paid for skills assessment while people were still employed at the station. The closing owner agreed to let assessors on site and, with each employee's consent, to share training and authorisation records. That saved months after people joined, and it allowed us to tell each applicant before they accepted which role they were qualified for and what further training they faced. People make better decisions with that information, and so do employers.
There is an objection I take seriously. A conditional offer made a year ahead ties up a role that might be needed sooner, and some offers will be declined at the last moment. We lost fourteen people between offer and start date. I would accept that rate again. The alternative was losing most of the experienced applicants before we had made them an offer at all.
Which skills travel and which have to be taught again
The second mistake employers make is to treat a power station worker as a powerline worker in waiting. Some skills transfer well. A station electrician understands high-voltage switching, isolation and permits to work, and can often become a substation technician after a structured assessment and a supervised period of about twelve weeks. Control technicians bring protection and instrumentation knowledge that substations need. Operators bring a habit of procedure that is valuable in any high-voltage environment.
Line work is different. Climbing, rigging, working near live conductors and judging terrain and weather on a remote easement are skills a station career does not teach. When we proposed recognition of prior learning for line roles, the union representing our powerline workers objected, and our head of safety agreed with it. They were right. Anyone moving into line work from the station completed the full conversion training, about eighteen months. Shortening it to fill crews faster would have transferred risk from our schedule to the people on the poles.
Families matter more than most recruitment plans admit. A station job is local and shift-based; much transmission work travels, sometimes for weeks. Twenty-six applicants withdrew after understanding how often field roles would take them away. Most told us that a briefing for partners at the start would have changed the conversation at home. We now hold one at the beginning of every transition recruitment.
My argument to other builders is narrow. Before you recruit from a closing station, find out what each person stands to lose by leaving early, and set your start dates so they lose nothing. Pay for the assessment while they are still employed, be honest about which roles need full training, and put the cost of waiting in your own budget. If that makes your project more expensive, the project was relying on a subsidy from the station's workers.