China's electricity-market reform is changing the capabilities energy businesses need. A fixed tariff schedule is increasingly giving way to prices that move with supply and demand. Generators, electricity Retailers, energy-intensive businesses and commercial and industrial storage companies are having to ask where their own trading capability will come from.
An April 2025 notice issued by the offices of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the National Energy Administration (NEA) called for electricity spot markets to achieve essentially full coverage by the end of 2025.
The NEA's 2025 China Electricity Market Development Report describes continuous spot trading across the provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities covered by 29 provincial grids, with seven provincial markets, including Shanxi, Guangdong and Shandong, entering formal operation. It gives market-traded electricity in 2025 as 6.64 trillion kWh, or 64.0% of total electricity consumption: roughly two of every three units consumed.
Against that backdrop, Electricity Trading has moved from a relatively obscure occupation towards the centre of the energy business. The talent pipeline is young. Electricity trading entered China's national occupational classification in 2022, followed by a national occupational standard in 2024. The first group certified in November 2024 comprised just 16 people.
“Electricity trading roles are becoming some of the hardest positions for energy companies to fill,” UB hunter says of its experience in energy and power recruitment.
New roles are appearing faster than the talent pool
Two or three years earlier, the firm's consultants recall, most such jobs sat in electricity retailers and selected generation groups. Now retailers are expanding trading teams, generators are adding spot-trading and strategy roles, and grid-side and integrated-energy businesses are building trading operations.
Virtual Power Plants add another source of demand. March 2025 NDRC and NEA guidance allows virtual power plants to participate independently in medium- and long-term electricity markets, spot markets and ancillary services. It records national VPP flexibility targets above 20 GW by 2027 and 50 GW by 2030.
These developments create work in product design, operations and aggregated trading, often under job titles that scarcely existed a few years earlier.
UB hunter divides the talent requirements into four groups:
- Trading execution: electricity traders and spot-market traders.
- Strategy and research: trading strategy and electricity-market analysis.
- Data and algorithms: load forecasting and generation or power-output forecasting.
- Virtual power plants: product and operations roles that connect distributed resources with markets.
Two groups are particularly difficult to recruit. Trading leaders need to set strategy and lead people while understanding power systems, market rules and trading decisions. Xinhua's coverage of the first certified traders highlights the combination of power-system operations, complex trading rules, environmental considerations, law and finance.
Forecasting specialists present a different combination: electricity-sector understanding and strong algorithmic capability. Candidates sit across energy-technology and data-science talent pools, with relatively few comfortable in both.
Search for capabilities, then look for the titles
“Where there is no mature talent market, we have to break the role into its underlying capabilities,” is how UB hunter describes its approach.
An electricity trader may come from a power retailer, a generation group's marketing or trading department, or a power-market research organisation. Someone with financial-trading experience may also be relevant if willing and able to learn the electricity market in depth.
For load forecasting, useful talent may sit in energy digitalisation businesses, grid IT teams, meteorology or data analysis. For VPP operations, adjacent experience can come from demand response, integrated-energy services and energy-internet platforms.
The consultant's work includes translating between these settings. Employers need to see how experience under a different title can meet the requirement, while candidates may need help recognising the value of their existing skills in an electricity-trading role.
This also creates a route for people with traditional power-sector backgrounds. Engineers and staff from marketing or dispatch may understand system behaviour and market rules but need to develop price sensitivity and trading judgement. Financial traders face the opposite learning task: acquiring the electricity-sector knowledge that gives those decisions context.
Rather than wait for a candidate who has every element already, employers can combine external hiring with internal development, selecting for core capability and making the remaining development needs explicit.
Where recruitment briefs go wrong
One mistake is to assess an electricity role through an overly narrow internet-industry or engineering template. A load-forecasting brief may concentrate on algorithms while ignoring knowledge of electricity demand. A trading brief may insist on a power-systems background without testing commercial and trading judgement.
Compensation can be misjudged too. These are emerging roles with an unsettled balance between supply and demand. A salary range copied from an established support function may be uncompetitive.
Money does not resolve every problem. Candidates with scarce combinations of skills also weigh business authority, the team they can build and their scope to develop.
In one UB hunter assignment, a rapidly expanding electricity retailer was recruiting a head of trading. The company was explicit about the person's authority to set strategy and the room available to build a team. That clarity was as attractive to candidates as the pay itself.
The lesson is to plan capability early. Developing people for these roles takes time, and waiting until a vacancy becomes urgent leaves an employer with fewer options.
Sector understanding makes the search more accurate
UB hunter describes electricity trading as an area it entered early, reasoning that an expanding market would need people to trade within it. The firm reports demand changing from occasional assignments into a sustained stream, and from individual traders into a wider range of strategy, algorithm and VPP operations roles.
That work requires consultants to keep following market rules and policy developments closely enough to discuss them with both employers and candidates. Familiarity with the sector is part of the assessment, rather than background reading separate from the search.
A February 2026 State Council General Office opinion sets out the next steps for the unified national electricity-market system. It describes a target for market-traded electricity to reach around 70% of total consumption by 2030, alongside full formal operation of electricity spot markets.
At UB hunter, we expect that demand will continue to expand over the following one to two years. Execution-oriented traders may become more widely available, while strategic, algorithmic and cross-disciplinary candidates remain scarce. Different provincial market rules and implementation schedules also make regional experience relevant to candidate fit.
Build the capability before the shortage becomes urgent
The underlying mismatch is between new jobs and an established talent market that was organised around different work. A more productive response is to define the component skills, search adjacent sectors, offer credible authority and begin internal development early.
At UB hunter, our power-sector expertise enables us to map the trading-related roles and identify candidates in electricity retail, grid operations, energy digitalisation or finance whose abilities fit even when their current job titles do not.