Abstract
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.
