Upskilling only earns its place in your diary if it changes the work you can evidence, price, supervise or accept. For a working electrician, the decision is not “which course looks useful?” but which skills gap currently restricts your work, such as inspection and testing, BS 7671 knowledge, EV charging, solar PV, electrical energy storage systems, supervisory responsibility or documentation.
This is important when retraining or upskilling because competence requirements around specialist work are becoming more explicit. The IET’s Electrotechnical Assessment Specification explains that from October 2026, competence requirements cover people undertaking the installation of EV charging equipment, solar photovoltaic systems, electrical energy storage systems and micro wind turbines. If those work areas are part of your future or near-term career plan, the order of your electrical competency training needs to reflect the evidence required for the tasks, not the order in which courses appear on a training timetable.
Start With The Task You Cannot Currently Evidence
At the risk of making an obvious point, when deciding where to retrain or expand your skills, look at the work you are being asked to do, not the work you already complete comfortably. By this we mean that many electricians instinctively look to develop skills they already have, taking X, Y or Z to the next level. This can be a positive way to strengthen and develop your skills as a specialist in a particular area, but it can also mean missing out on growing or lucrative opportunities.
For instance, if you are being asked about domestic battery storage but have no formal training in electrical energy storage systems, that is a defined gap. If your clients want you to take on more testing work but you do not yet have the inspection, testing and certification evidence to support that role, that is a different gap. If you are moving into EV charge point work, your plan should include the installation, testing, supply assessment and documentation requirements attached to that equipment category.
The Department for Education’s Employer Skills Survey reported that 12% of employers had skills gaps in 2024, affecting 1.26 million employees. In electrical work, that can show up as a narrow bottleneck: one person handles the certification, one supervisor signs everything off, one team member understands specialist equipment, or enquiries are declined because nobody can evidence the competence. Your training sequence should target the bottleneck first.
Put Core Electrical Evidence Before Specialist Expansion
Specialist training is stronger when the underlying electrical evidence is current. So if you want renewable energy courses for electricians, the course choice should be linked back to BS 7671, inspection and testing, safe isolation, fault protection, certification, and the way the system connects into the wider installation.
The IET’s EAS material separates competence areas rather than treating “electrical experience” as a single category. It covers qualified supervisors, electrical inspectors and specialist installation work. That structure is useful when planning your own long term development route. It forces you to decide whether you are trying to improve inspection and testing capability, specialist installation competence, supervisory responsibility, or all three over a staged period.
A sensible sequence may look like this:
- Bring your BS 7671 knowledge up to date if your last formal qualification no longer reflects the version you work to.
- Strengthen your inspection and testing capabilities before moving into work where verification and certification become more complex.
- Invest in EV charging, solar PV or electrical energy storage training only when it is tied to real work opportunities, supervised practice or a structured business plan.
- Keep your certificates, assessment records and practical evidence in one place so your competence can be shown rather than explained from memory.
Separate Your Main Route From Your Adjacent Route
Trying to train in every specialist area at once creates shallow coverage. You end up as a jack of all trades, but master of none. If your primary direction is domestic low-carbon work, for example, solar PV and electrical energy storage may sit together, with EV charging as an adjacent service. If your primary direction is commercial responsibility, however, inspection and testing, three-phase understanding and fault diagnosis may sit ahead of renewables.
Approved electrician qualifications should ideally strengthen your defined work role, while electrical competency training should close a named gap in the market. By the time you’ve completed a course of qualification, your training record should show the work you can carry out, the systems you have trained on, the inspection or supervisory responsibility you can evidence, and the areas where further supervision is still required.
What Next?
Plan your next qualification with PTT around the work you need to evidence, from BS 7671 and inspection to EV charging, solar PV or storage. Click here to speak with one of our advisers about your next training course and how it can benefit your career.
