Beyond the ‘skills gap’: German installation enterprises need organisational restructuring to implement low-carbon transitions

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides empirical evidence on installation enterprise dynamics, challenging the skills gap narrative and offering a framework for studying similar transitions in other countries.

🏢実務担当者:Installation firms can use the findings to identify bottlenecks in adopting low-carbon services and explore new business models involving planning, consulting, and cross-trade cooperation.

🏛政策担当者:Suggests that policies should support organizational restructuring and digitalisation in skilled trades, rather than only addressing training gaps.

The skilled worker shortage in the installation trades constitutes a critical challenge to implementing low-carbon transitions globally, but the scientific attention to installers and their perspectives remains limited. This paper studies perspectives of craft entrepreneurs in four installation trades in Germany: roofers, electricians, heating installers, and painters. For this, it takes a novel mixed methods approach, drawing from interviews and an original survey of craft entrepreneurs ( N = 230), co-created transdisciplinarily with craft stakeholders. It demonstrates that the skilled worker shortage manifests for craft entrepreneurs as a question of order prioritisation, rendering them pivotal gatekeepers who decide on transforming their enterprise towards low-carbon installations (LCIs), such as heat pumps, photovoltaics, or building insulation. We find that LCIs are likely to be deprioritised because they impose challenging change requirements on installation enterprises. Challenges relate to novel solutions, skills, work processes, business structures, economic calculations, and external framework conditions. The attractiveness of LCIs differs across trades and technologies, depending on LCIs' compatibility with business-as-usual practices, the concession of unskilled competition, and the order situation in alternative business fields. Crucially, for craft entrepreneurs, impediments to LCI provision result from the required changes in business practices rather than from a lack of installation-related skills. Our results show that the conventional organisational and business model of the skilled trades is reaching its limits in LCI provision, which requires more planning, consulting, cross-trade cooperation, bureaucracy, and digitalisation. Therefore, policymaking should expand its focus beyond the ‘skills gap’, facilitate organisational restructuring in installation enterprises, and improve the regulatory framework. • Craft entrepreneurs gatekeep low-carbon transitions through order prioritisation. • Low-carbon installations (LCIs) are likely deprioritised by incumbent enterprises. • LCIs require changes in skills, business practices, and organisational structures. • LCIs' appeal depends on their fit to existing practices and opportunity costs. • Changing practices and structures deters entrepreneurs from LCIs, not a skills gap.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2026.104696first seen 2026-05-17 05:24:53