A baseline is a promise about the future. It says: here is what this plant consumes today, and here is how we will know if anything improves. Break that promise into a shared responsibility and it quietly fails. Meters get recalibrated, production mixes change, a line gets upgraded, and no one reconciles the numbers against the original method.
When a plant engineer owns the baseline end to end, accountability is clear. One person signs off the data sources, documents the assumptions, and defends the figures when a finance director or an auditor asks how they were derived. That is the difference between an energy figure you can act on and a spreadsheet nobody trusts.
Ownership also protects the AI work that sits on top. Energy models, anomaly detection and automated optimisation are only as good as the baseline they learn from. If the foundation is undocumented and unowned, the automation inherits the confusion.
The appetite for automation is real, but the people to run it are scarce. Make UK's AI, Skills and the Future of UK Manufacturing report found that over 50% of manufacturers cite skills shortages as the main barrier to AI adoption, and only 2% say AI is widely embedded across their operations.
The shift in what firms need is just as striking. Make UK's 2030 Skills: Closing the Gap report found six in ten (59%) manufacturers cited automation and half (50%) cited wider digitalisation as trends changing jobs and skills needs, with 74% expecting demand for cognitive and meta-cognitive skills to increase by 2030.
Hiring pressure is broad. Barclays Corporate's analysis of the skills shortage in UK manufacturing ranked skills shortages (75%), recruitment (36%) and talent retention (32%) as manufacturers' top barriers to growth.
The roles that own energy data sit right in the middle of the shortage. The Institution of Engineering and Technology's 2025 skills statistics found 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, with technical and specialist sustainability skills topping the list.
That matters here because a good baseline owner blends several of those scarce skills at once: plant engineering knowledge to understand the process, data literacy to handle the measurement, and sustainability expertise to tie consumption to targets. Few people carry all three, which is exactly why the role gets left unassigned.
Many firms are responding by growing their own. The Make UK Executive Survey 2026 found 40% of manufacturers are looking to upskill their existing workforce, specifically for redeployment as a result of automation and digitalisation, a figure that increases for firms with more than 1,000 employees.
Start with the deliverable, not the job title. Write the role around the baseline itself: who documents the method, who owns the meters and data feeds, who reports against the figures each quarter, and who defends them in an audit. That clarity attracts the right person and filters out the wrong one.
Speed helps too. Scarce skills move fast, so a slow process loses the best people to someone quicker off the mark. Agree your interview panel, your questions and your decision window before you post the role.
When you are ready to hire, we can help you find the plant engineer who will own your energy baseline. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost, through Reed.ai. If you are filling a baseline ownership gap, start a search with us today.
