2025 was a peculiar year for the energy industry, globally and in Japan. Not because of a single technological breakthrough or policy pivot, but because the rules of the game shifted abruptly.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House restored political momentum to fossil fuels. For energy companies, this meant not just a more complex investment environment, but a faster-moving one that increasingly rewarded speed, flexibility and specialist expertise.

At the same time, the first large-scale battery storage projects came online, nuclear power re-entered the mainstream, and grid constraints replaced land scarcity as the sector’s defining bottleneck. All these carry distinct implications for engineers, developers, policy specialists and commercial talent.

Looking ahead, 2026 is likely to be shaped less by decarbonization targets alone than by the twin imperatives of energy economics and energy security. Japan’s focus is toward technologies it can scale, defend and export – from storage and grids to nuclear and hard-tech manufacturing.

As a result, the most acute pressures in the energy sector will not only be financial or regulatory, but human: where talent is scarce, where it is being redeployed, and where new capabilities must be built almost from scratch.

The key question is which functions and sectors will feel the pull first – and where the gaps will prove hardest to fill. The following sections set out our expectations for functional and sectoral talent demand in 2026.