Kenya Power hired 1,154 new staff, including 435 engineers, in the year ended June 2026.
Kenya Power hired 1,154 new staff, including 435 engineers, in the year ended June 2026, marking the single highest number of new staff recruited in a year as the utility races to cope with workforce demand amid infrastructure upgrades and expansion.
This marks the third consecutive year Kenya Power has hired new staff and reduced a staffing deficit that it put at 2,981 employees two years ago.
Kenya Power’s hiring spree makes it one of the few listed firms aggressively tapping new talent in an economy where the majority of companies are shedding workforce amid dwindling fortunes and high operational costs.
The utility had 10,582 staff as at June 2025 and is currently implementing a phased three-year recruitment to plug staffing gaps and ensure succession planning while prioritising critical skills mainly in the technical fields.
“Over a very long period, there has been serious attrition of engineers (mainly retirement and going abroad for studies). This is an area that has suffered for long. For once we took a good number of these just to mitigate, but it does not cover the numbers we have lost over the last five years,” Dr Joseph Siror, Managing Director of Kenya Power, said on Friday.
The 1,154 new staff that Kenya Power hired in the year ended June is more than double the 490 that it tapped the previous year and also higher than the 836 hired in the year ended June 2024.
Kenya Power MD Joseph Siror.
Kenya Power joins banks in a hiring spree meant to replace those who have exited via resignations, retirement, and also to shore up numbers and meet growing customer numbers and demands.
KCB Group, NCBA Group, Co-operative Bank of Kenya and Equity Group added a combined 1,809 staff in the year ended December 2026, bringing their total staff count to 35,114.
But the hiring across the five listed firms is a stark contrast to scores of other companies that are cutting their staff numbers amid dwindling business or high operational costs.
The hirings at Kenya Power and the listed banks give hope to the thousands of university and college graduates who have been forced to endure limited job openings in Kenya’s formal sector.
Kenya Power earlier disclosed that some 2,234 staff had exited the firm in the five years to June 2024 and a further 488 were expected to exit by June this year.
The high number of exits prompted the utility to embark on a hiring spree to help it deliver services to its over 10.4 million customers.
“For this reason, the Company is implementing a three-year manpower development plan that will address staffing gaps and succession planning while prioritising critical skills,” Kenya Power disclosed in its annual report for the year ended June 2024.
The utility says that over 85 percent of Kenya Power’s staff are in the technical departments managing its extensive grid that spans over 328,000 kilometres and in customer-facing functions to serve the over 10.4 million clients.
Kenya Power last year rolled out a fully funded car and mortgage loan facility at a subsidised interest rate of three per cent as part of sweeteners to attract and retain top talent.
Follow our WhatsApp channel for breaking news updates and more stories like this.
