Let’s see if Singletrack can answer this one.

I graduated as a civil engineer, did a couple of years working for a small engineering consultancy taking small hydro schemes from conception to beyond commissioning. Then I moved to the civil service a year ago to do something that has turned out to be not a lot to do with engineering.

So I’ve been job hunting for a month – Institute of Civil Engineers Website, S1 jobs, googling for relevant companies.

I’m finding few jobs advertised that could lead me back to renewables. Anyone know of any good routes for getting back into this industry?

Willing to work UK wide but wanting to maintain my house and family in Fort William.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. Sorry about the dry topic matter.

Renewables in the UK has taken a massive hit – lot’s of people leaving that sector. I’d go for rail at the moment – appreciate that’s not helpful.

Vattenfall were recently advertising a project engineer role out of their Hexham office. Feasibility study through to completion for onshore windfarms.

You’ll probably be waiting a long time if you are just waiting for job ads to appear! Certainly in consultancy my experience is networking and word of mouth is where the jobs come from.

I’d be looking for who is currently developing run of river hydro, onshore wind, who they are contracting the civils work out to, and ringing them all up and firing your cv out to them. Still a lot of onshore development going on and even every offshore development will have a significant amount of onshore work, not sure there will be a huge amount of offshore projects in Scottish waters though.

Yeah they’re cutting a lot of the research funding into the more unusual concepts up here, last engineer I spoke to about it said they’d been laid off and there were no more jobs in the field anywhere in Scotland. Seem offshore wind is being selected as the primary way forward. Nuclear decommissioning seems to be doing well.

Don’t know if it’s the right way to go about it, but I know that MAM Contracting in Creiff do a lot of hydro schemes etc., would it be worth contacting them for a chat?

We had 3 vacancies cancelled which were renewables based at the start of the year however there still could be ways i can help. Drop me a line (e mail in profile)

Waderider, I was working in renewables myself until fairly recently. I still know quite a few people in the industry including some doing hydro in Scotland. I just messaged one of them and he would be happy to take a look at your CV and to pass it to some of his contacts. You are certainly based in the right part of the UK for what work there still is in the industry. Either drop me a PM with your CV or if you prefer I’ll PM you my contact’s details. Hope it helps.

Nuclear decommissioning seems to be doing well.

It’s a job for life says a friend who works in decommissioning, and like O&G decom there are only going to be more and more jobs in the area.

This is a good site for keeping up to date http://renews.biz/tag/europe+scotland/

though they seem to have made it a bit annoying by removing categories

I used to work for RES. Based in London but have an office in Glasgow.

Fire me an email. Can try put a word in for you!