Most charge point rollouts are staffed in the wrong order. Not because anyone is careless, but because the plan is written around the build programme, and the build programme is not the same shape as the hiring programme. Sites get committed, a delivery date is set, and recruitment starts against the milestones. By the time the roles are advertised, the people who could have filled them have taken something else.
This is the practical version: which roles a rollout actually needs, the order they have to arrive in, and the three or four places programmes reliably slow down.
What roles does a charge point rollout actually need?
Six functions, and they do not all belong to the same employer. A rollout needs site acquisition, grid connection, electrical design, installation, commissioning and energisation, and network operations. Installation is usually subcontracted, commissioning sits awkwardly between three parties, and grid connection is the one most operators try to absorb into an existing project manager’s job.
The functions arrive in a sequence that is roughly the reverse of how urgent they feel:
- Site acquisition and planning is first and least technical. It is a property and local authority relationship job, not an engineering one.
- Grid connection runs in parallel and takes longest. It is the function that decides whether a site happens at all.
- Electrical design follows the connection offer, not the other way round.
- Installation is the visible part and the shortest. It is also the part with the deepest labour shortage.
- Commissioning and energisation is the gap between the installer, the operator and the network operator.
- Operations is hired last and should not be.
Which of these is hardest to hire?
Installation and commissioning, consistently, and the evidence is not subtle. In Belgium the Flemish public employment service classifies charge point installation as a knelpuntberoep, a shortage occupation, which is a government designation rather than anybody’s opinion. One Flemish installation specialist has been running near-identical installer and service technician adverts across at least ten regions simultaneously, several open since December 2025.
In Germany the same pattern shows up at the manufacturer end: one hardware business has run nine separate field service technician postings across German cities at once. That is what a company looks like when it has sold more capability than it can staff.
Why does grid connection decide the programme?
Because it is the only step that cannot be compressed by spending more. The operators say so themselves. The e-mobility lead at Germany’s largest fast charging operator described grid connection in June 2026 as the point that outshines everything else, and said expansion across the many regional grid operators takes years.
Germany is unusual in that the hiring has caught up with the argument. There is a job title for it, Netzanschlussmanager, and operators advertise it directly. In most markets there is no title, which means the capability exists inside general project roles and cannot be found by searching for it.
The Netherlands shows what happens when the constraint becomes structural. Since January 2026 the regulator has run a framework deciding who gets a connection in a congested area, and public charging carries no priority category in it at all. It queues behind housing, care and education. The people who can navigate that queue mostly work for grid operators, municipalities and provincial authorities rather than for charge point operators.
What order should the hires actually go in?
Work backwards from energisation, not forwards from contract award.
- Grid connection first, before site acquisition is finished, because the connection lead time sets everything behind it.
- Site acquisition next, running alongside.
- Design once connection offers start landing.
- Installation capacity committed early even though the work is late, because this is the scarce layer and the lead time is on the people, not the task.
- Commissioning hired before it is needed, because it is nobody’s job by default.
- Operations far earlier than feels natural.
What do operators consistently get wrong?
Three things, and they repeat across every market we work in.
Treating a concession award as a hiring signal. It usually is not. Both Belgian regional concessions changed hands in the last year and neither winner ran a visible technical hiring wave, because the work goes to the installers underneath them. If you read the award as the moment to hire, you are looking at the wrong employers.
Leaving commissioning unowned. It sits in the gap between the operator, the installer and the grid operator, which is exactly why it stays nobody’s job until the energisation date moves. Hire for it early or explain it late.
Writing the brief for a title rather than the work. In France almost every one of these roles sits under one broad term, IRVE, covering everything from an installing electrician to a commercial lead. Searching the title finds a fraction of the market and the wrong fraction.
How long should a charge point hire take?
Four to six weeks from brief to accepted offer for a straightforward role, across the European markets we work in. Our own average across all roles is 22 days.
Past seven weeks, the brief is usually the problem rather than the market. The common causes are a salary band set against the wrong segment, a title that describes one profession for a job that needs two, or a requirement for sector experience in a market where the sector is too young to have produced it.
The installer layer is the exception. There the shortage is genuine and national, and a search running long is not necessarily evidence of a bad brief.
Where does the capability come from if it is not in the sector?
Mostly from outside it, and that is fine as long as the brief admits it. Charge point installation competes for qualified electricians with solar and heat pumps rather than with other charging businesses, and increasingly the constraint is the qualification rather than the experience.
The harder question is why somebody should move. Hiring from outside the sector means persuading somebody to change industry, and that turns on two things most businesses have never written down: why a good engineer should come into EV charging rather than any other part of the transition, and why they should come to you rather than the operator down the road. Most cannot answer either, because most offer the same things.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need charging sector experience? For installation and field service, usually not, and insisting on it will make the search much harder in a market this young. For grid connection and commissioning it helps considerably, because both turn on relationships and procedures that are local and slow to learn.
Should we hire or subcontract installation? It depends on volume and how long the programme runs. Both are defensible and the decision changes what else you need to hire.
When is it too early to hire an operations lead? Later than most operators think, and they almost always hire too late rather than too early.
If you are planning a rollout and want to know what the hiring actually looks like in your market, book a discovery call. Half an hour, with the consultant who runs that market, and you get the market read whether you work with us or not.
Sources
- Bundesnetzagentur, Ladesäulenregister, 1 July 2026
- ecomento, quoting EnBW on grid connection, 10 June 2026
- VDAB knelpuntberoepen list, 2026
- Autoriteit Consument & Markt prioritisation framework, from 1 January 2026
- Net Zero Evolution market intelligence across 13 EV charging markets, reviewed monthly