Beyond the ‘skills gap’: German installation enterprises need organisational restructuring to implement low-carbon transitions

The skilled worker shortage in the installation trades constitutes a critical challenge to implementing low-carbon transitions globally, but the scientific attention to installers and their perspectives remains limited. This paper studies perspectives of craft entrepreneurs in four installation trades in Germany: roofers, electricians, heating installers, and painters. For this, it takes a novel mixed methods approach, drawing from interviews and an original survey of craft entrepreneurs ( N = 2