Guide for Employment Impact Assessments in the Renewable Energy Sector

Renewable energy investments are frequently presented as job-creating interventions. Yet their employment effects are neither automatic nor confined to the number of workers engaged during construction and installation. Renewable energy investments influence employment through multiple channels and over different time horizons: they generate direct jobs during development, construction and installation, commissioning, and operations and maintenance; support indirect jobs through supply chains; and can stimulate induced employment through local consumption expenditure effects. Over time, they may also reshape labour-market opportunities more broadly by expanding access to reliable and affordable electricity, enabling enterprises to emerge, expand, and upgrade, and supporting growth in connected economic activities. Because these effects differ in form, timing, and visibility, they cannot be understood through construction-phase headcounts alone.

It is against this backdrop that Employment Impact Assessments (EmpIAs) have become an important tool for the ILO. An EmpIA helps convert broad expectations about “jobs” into evidence that can support real decisions: what employment is being generated, for whom, through which channels, under what conditions, and with what trade-offs. This matters not only for understanding employment quantity, but also for assessing job quality, inclusion, and labour standards; including in the renewable energy sector. Without such an assessment, renewable energy programmes often rely on partial signals. Employment creation may be overstated, differences across technologies and delivery models may remain obscured, and risks related to informality, wage compliance, occupational safety and health, or exclusion may remain invisible until they emerge as implementation or accountability problems.

This guide provides a practical framework for conducting EmpIAs in the renewable energy sector. It is intended for the institutions and practitioners who plan, finance, design, implement, supervise, and evaluate renewable energy investments, as well as for the analysts supporting those processes. Its central premise is that an EmpIA should begin with a clear decision-use purpose. This means establishing, from the outset, who will use the findings, which decision they are intended to inform, what employment effects are in scope, and what level of analytical depth is feasible within the available assessment window. On that basis, the guide sets out how to design an assessment, choose appropriate methods and indicators, collect and analyze evidence, and report results in a form that matches policy and project decision cycles.

The guidance also emphasizes that not every EmpIA needs to estimate every type of employment effect, nor apply every available method. What matters is that the assessment is fit for purpose, transparent about its assumptions and limitations, and proportionate to the context in which it is undertaken. In some cases, the priority may be an ex-ante job estimation, or to measure direct employment and job quality during implementation; in others, it may be to estimate indirect and induced effects, or to examine longer-term effects such as sustained operations and maintenance jobs and employment enabled through the productive use of energy. Across all cases, the objective remains the same: to produce credible, decision-relevant evidence that helps identify feasible improvements in design and delivery, clarify trade-offs, and strengthen accountability and learning across renewable energy projects, programmes, and portfolios.
A distinctive feature of the guide is its insistence that employment impacts should not be reduced to headline job numbers alone. A meaningful assessment must also consider who benefits, under what conditions, and with what implications for inclusion, resilience, and labour standards. This includes attention to issues such as wages, working time, occupational safety and health, social protection, formality, skills development, and the participation of women and youth. By making these dimensions visible, EmpIAs can support more informed decisions on procurement and contracting, subcontracting, localisation and supplier development, operations and maintenance models, skills and certification pathways, and complementary measures that can improve employment outcomes in practice.

Taken together, the guide seeks to make employment analysis in renewable energy investments more operational, more comparable, and more useful for action. It presents the EmpIA not simply as an analytical exercise, but as a practical instrument for improving project design, guiding implementation, supporting policy dialogue, and strengthening the accountability of investments that are often justified in employment terms.