Unearthed

Joining the watery dots

How do we fix a national skills shortage in a profession most people never learn exists? Rhiannon Marchi-Smith reports on career pathways in hydrogeology – a profession at the heart of resilience

Words by Rhiannon Marchi-Smith
2 March 2026

We talk a lot about national resilience: drought, flooding, water quality, and the energy transition. We talk less about the people who make resilience possible. Hydrogeologists sit quietly at the centre of it all, translating between the unseen subsurface, the policies, data, and infrastructure.

Reconnecting with our geological story

Hydrogeology as a discipline grew alongside civil and environmental engineering, shaped by practical questions about the ground: water supply, dewatering, contamination, and foundations and ground stability. This heritage gave the field strength in hydraulics, mechanics, and modelling – tools essential to understanding how water moves through the ground.

But deeper roots lie in geology. The best hydrogeologists read the ground as a story: the rhythm of sediments, traces of ancient rivers and buried landscapes, the way Quaternary deposits record water’s path through time. These aren’t just details in a borehole log; they’re narrative threads explaining how aquifers behave and why water moves the way it does.

Understanding the ground goes beyond technical knowledge; it’s storytelling

Geology is our storybook, a record of shifting rivers, glacial tills, fractured bedrock, and permeable pathways still controlling groundwater flow today. Understanding the ground goes beyond technical knowledge; it’s storytelling: making sense of how the subsurface connects to surface processes, climate, and people.

As we face new challenges around drought, flooding, and contamination, reconnecting the analytical precision of engineering and the interpretive insights of geology is vital. By teaching hydrogeology as both science and story, we remind students that understanding water starts with understanding the ground beneath their feet. A robust education and career pipeline strengthens our capacity to respond to the challenges we collectively face.

The Streetly report

In 2023, the committee for the Geological Society Hydrogeological Group published Access to Careers in UK Hydrogeology (authored by Mike Streetly). It confirmed what many in the profession already sensed: the growing demand for hydrogeological skills is outpacing the declining supply of hydrogeologists.

The report identified familiar challenges – declining MSc enrolments, reduced teaching capacity, an ageing professional workforce – but it also highlighted new opportunities. As the oil and gas sector restructures, experienced subsurface specialists are looking to reskill. With the right bridging support, they could help meet the growing need for expertise in groundwater, mine-water, and energy transition projects.

Survey responses revealed something else. Employees wanted more training in communication, policy, and stakeholder engagement, but these areas weren’t emphasised in MSc curricula or employer-development plans. The skills that make hydrogeologists effective are as much translation as calculation: communicating uncertainty, framing risk, and connecting science with decision-making.

There are signs the geology/ geoscience sector is responding. The Level 6 Geoscience Apprenticeship (a professional qualification equivalent to a Bachelor’s degree combining on-the-job training with academic study) is becoming established, collaborations between professional institutions are strengthening, and outreach initiatives such as the Geological Society’s ‘This is Geoscience’ are widening the conversation. Discussions about opening the Environment Agency’s in-house geoscience training scheme to external participants are underway. This could provide a structured route for early-career professionals to gain the practical experience sought by employers. Such initiatives illustrate the potential value in treating the skills pipeline as a shared resource rather than the responsibility of others.

The Streetly report is a timely reminder that improving access is not only about the number of people entering the field, but about how effectively they can connect hydrogeology to the systems it serves.

Pipeline as a system

I asked a secondary school geography teacher whether pupils learn about groundwater. The answer was a pause, then: “Not really.” The school curriculum includes the water cycle eight times, but groundwater only appears as a thin blue line on a hydrograph.

Pupils learn the observable symptoms of hydrogeology – floods, droughts, river flow – but not the system beneath. They know rain falls, rivers rise, but not how and where the water hides, travels, or reappears.

At school, geology remains niche and hydrogeology almost invisible. At university, it’s buried in a hydraulics module, valuable but detached from stories of people, place, and policy.

The Level 6 (Batchelor’s degree) Geoscience Apprenticeship has opened an alternative route, yet progress slows at the next step. A Level 7 (MSc) Hydrogeology Apprenticeship, which would bridge academic depth and professional practice, is in development but struggles for cross-sector support.

Collaboration between professional bodies is strengthening. These are genuine steps forward

There are signs of progress. Professional bodies including the Geological Society’s Hydrogeological Group, the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management and the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining are exploring shared events and conversations around skills and resilience. These are small steps, but they matter. Collaboration starts through relationships. Informal coordination can begin to build the systems thinking needed.

Capacity in academia

Some universities no longer have staff to teach hydrogeology. Those that do rely on staff who juggle heavy workloads or short contracts. It’s not lack of interest, but lack of capacity.

Practising hydrogeologists work in industry, not academia. Consequently, although students learn about groundwater, they do not do so from those who manage it day-to-day. This weakens mentoring, making it harder for students to picture themselves in the profession.

Mature students and career changers are often left out of outreach and recruitment discussions. They bring experience, perspective, practical thinking – exactly the qualities the sector needs.

Professionals leaving the oil and gas industry and looking to reskill already understand the subsurface, project delivery, and risk. With the right bridging courses and mentoring, their skills translate directly into groundwater, mine water, and energy transition work.

The talent pipeline is an ecosystem. The above types of people aren’t side streams but essential tributaries. We need to build a feedback loop between education and practice so knowledge can move both ways. This doesn’t mean pulling people out of industry and into universities; it means creating new teaching models: practitioner-led modules, shared lectures, secondments, and digital co-teaching.

Risk to national resilience

The UK faces growing pressures from drought, flooding, synthetic chemicals (such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS), and the low-carbon energy transition. Hydrogeology sits at the centre, yet the skills pipeline is nebulous.

When universities cannot staff hydrogeology courses, postgraduate routes falter, and early-career professionals cannot see a path to specialise, we weaken the very system that manages our most critical resource.

Building resilience means investing in the UK’s infrastructure, but also in people: hydrogeologists who understand how water interacts with that infrastructure.

Where next?

The Level 6 Geoscience Apprenticeship has made a strong start. Collaboration between professional bodies is strengthening. These are genuine steps forward.

But the system lacks connection. Until the stories we tell in schools, universities, degree apprenticeships, and professional networks link together, and people can place themselves in those stories, we will continue to lose potential hydrogeologists to other sectors.

Hydrogeology doesn’t need to be reinvented, but reconnected.

Author

Rhiannon Marchi-Smith

RMS Groundwater Strategies Ltd., UK

Further reading