Before the first site energises, not after. The operations team has to be in place for commissioning, because commissioning is the handover, and a handover with nobody on the receiving side is just a date in a plan.
Most operators hire operations once there is an estate to operate. By then the first sites have been live for months, the faults have been handled by whoever was nearest, and the knowledge of how those sites actually behave is sitting with a contractor who has moved on.
Why does commissioning decide the timing?
Because it is the step that belongs to nobody by default.
Commissioning sits in the gap between the developer or operator, the installer and the network operator. Each of the three has a reason to think it is one of the others’ job, which is why it stays unowned until the energisation date moves. That is the single most common cause of slip we see in charging programmes, and it is a staffing problem rather than a technical one.
The operations lead is the natural owner. They are the only party whose interest is in the site working for years rather than being finished on a date.
What does hiring late actually cost?
Three things, none of which show up as a line in a budget.
The first sites teach you the most and you learn it twice. Whatever goes wrong on sites one to ten is the template for the rest. If nobody from operations was there, that learning leaves with the contractor.
Faults get handled rather than fixed. An estate with no operations function still has faults, they are just absorbed by project people whose job is the next site. The underlying cause does not get addressed.
You hire under pressure. An operations lead recruited because the estate has become unmanageable is a different, worse hire than one recruited to a plan, and the market knows the difference.
What about the shift from building to maintaining?
This is the part most rollout plans have not caught up with.
Across the UK charging vendors measured at Solar and Storage Live in September 2026, the largest single block of open roles was operations, service and asset management at 35%, with field and installation trades behind it at 17%. The installed base is now big enough to need keeping alive, and service engineers are harder to find than the people who put the chargers in.
That is a reversal of where the sector was three years ago, and it means operations hiring is no longer the quiet phase after the build. It is now the competitive part.
Who should you hire first?
One person, and the sequencing matters more than the volume.
Start with somebody who can own commissioning and energisation. They bridge the build and the estate, and they are the hire that stops the date slipping.
Then the network operations capability, which is monitoring, fault triage and the relationship with the hardware manufacturers. Often this starts as part of somebody’s job and becomes its own function somewhere around a few hundred points.
Field service after that, scaled against the estate rather than the build programme. This is the layer that grows forever, because it is a function of how many units are live rather than how many are being installed.
What makes operations hires hard here?
The pool is small and the job is younger than the people you want.
Charging operations asks for somebody who understands the hardware, the software platform, the customer and the grid relationship at once. Very few careers produce that combination, because the sector has not existed long enough. In practice the strongest candidates come from adjacent estate-based businesses: telecoms, vending, ATMs, fuel retail, anywhere with dispersed assets that must stay up.
That is a wider pool than most operators search, and it is where we find these people.
How long does it take?
Four to six weeks for a straightforward operations hire, and our own average across all roles is 22 days. Leadership roles in operations run longer, because the credible pool in any one country is small enough to count.
The practical implication is that if you are energising in three months, the conversation should be happening now.
Frequently asked questions
Can the project manager cover operations at the start? For a handful of sites, yes. The failure mode is that it never stops being a temporary arrangement, and the estate grows past it before anyone notices.
Do they need charging experience? Less than you would think. Estate operations experience from an adjacent dispersed-asset sector transfers well. Grid relationship experience is harder to substitute.
When does field service become its own team? When the estate rather than the build programme is generating the work, which is usually earlier than planned.
If you are approaching first energisation and have not yet hired for it, book a discovery call and we will tell you what the market looks like for that role.
Sources
- Vacancy analysis across 439 exhibiting companies at Solar and Storage Live UK, measured 22 September 2026
- Net Zero Evolution market intelligence across 13 EV charging markets, reviewed monthly