The Role the Battery Industry Keeps Forgetting to Hire
Ninety percent of battery professionals learned their job on the job.
That is from the Volta Foundation's Battery Talent Census, and it is the number I keep returning to. Only 34 percent of respondents said they felt confident in their skills. And most of them lean toward R&D — even though the industry's demand is highest, by a wide margin, in manufacturing.
An industry that trained itself on the job, is not confident in the result, and is pointed at the wrong end of the value chain. That is the workforce we are trying to scale gigafactories with.
Six roles, one shortage
A while ago I tried to map the industry's people into the roles it actually needs. I ended up with six.
Pathfinders — students and early-career professionals bringing curiosity and fresh eyes. Makers — researchers and founders who create the prototypes. Builders — the engineers and operators who scale a prototype into production. Guardians — EHS and ESG professionals who keep it safe and sustainable. Visionaries — CEOs and policymakers who set direction. Connectors — the people who bridge science, policy, and industry, and who translate between them.
All six are necessary. The industry is badly out of balance across them.
Innovation starts with Makers. Leadership starts with Visionaries. But without Builders, none of it reaches the ground. And Builders are the role we are shortest of, by a distance — the Upjohn Institute projects roughly 310,000 battery-related jobs in the United States by 2030, and the overwhelming majority of them are Builder jobs we have not trained people for.
What commercialization support should I recommend to battery startups in my accelerator cohort?
Start by asking what the company is missing, because it is almost never a Maker.
The founders in most battery cohorts are Makers. That is why they founded the company. They have a prototype, they understand it deeply, and they can talk about it fluently to other Makers.
What they usually lack is a Builder — someone who has actually scaled a process and knows where it breaks — and a Connector, someone who can take what the Maker knows and make it legible to a customer, an investor, a regulator, or a hire who does not share the Maker's training.
Most accelerator support is aimed at the Maker's problems: technical validation, IP, early funding. That is valuable. But the gap that kills companies between pilot and production is a Builder gap, and the gap that stalls deals between a working prototype and a signed customer is a Connector gap. Neither is a chemistry problem, and neither gets solved by another technical milestone.
Why Connectors matter more right now than they should
In a healthy industry, Connectors are useful. In this one, they are load-bearing — because the Builder pipeline does not exist yet, and someone has to bridge the distance until it does.
When a battery company cannot hire the manufacturing engineer it needs, the founder ends up explaining scale-up realities to investors themselves. When the company cannot find a commercial lead who understands cells, the CTO ends up on sales calls. Every one of those is a Connector job being done by someone who was not hired for it, at the expense of the job they were.
I suspect this is the quiet reason so many technically excellent battery companies feel understaffed even when headcount looks fine. The org chart has Makers. The work needs translation.
What I would tell a founder
You cannot hire your way out of the Builder shortage this year. The people do not exist in the numbers the industry needs, and the training programs that will produce them are only now being built.
What you can do is stop asking your Makers to be Connectors by accident. Decide, deliberately, who does the translation — between your engineers and your buyers, between your data and your investors, between what your technology does and why anyone outside the lab should care. Give that work a name and a person.
And when you look at your cohort, your portfolio, or your own team, count the Connectors. If the answer is zero, that is the gap. Not the chemistry.
The full six-role framework, with more on the Builder shortage and what closes it, is in Battery Future.
