Aerogel Insulation – Closing the Skills Gap with Women at the Front
It looks like frozen smoke. That is the description that tends to stop people when they first encounter aerogel — a material so light it seems barely to exist, yet capable of insulating a building better than almost anything else of comparable thickness. Up to 99.8% of air, structured at the nanoscale, aerogel achieves thermal conductivity that conventional insulation materials cannot approach. A wall insulated with aerogel based insulating boards can be significantly thinner than one achieving the same thermal performance with mineral wool or expanded polystyrene. In deep retrofit work, where interior space is precious and structural modification is constrained, that difference is not aesthetic. It is decisive.
Despite all its extraordinary properties, aerogel has remained a niche product in construction — limited by its high production cost and energy-intensive manufacturing process. The SNUG project is working to change that, developing aerogel-based insulation solutions that draw on waste streams — construction and demolition waste, and recycled aerogel composite offcuts — to reduce both cost and embodied carbon substantially. The result is a family of products: blown-in insulation for retrofitting of wall cavities, and lime-based insulation plasters and renders for both modern and heritage building envelopes.
These are products that will need to be installed by a skilled workforce. A workforce that, by and large, does not yet exist. That is the skills gap at the heart of this post — and the reason why the question of who fills it matters so much.
Why aerogel demands new skills — and creates new opportunities
Working with aerogel is not like working with mineral wool batts or standard render mortars. The material’s properties — its fragility in granular form, its hydrophobicity, its behavior when incorporated into insulation plasters or blown into cavities — require specific handling knowledge. Get it wrong and you lose the aerogel content, compromise the thermal performance, and potentially waste an expensive material. Get it right and you deliver insulation performance that no conventional product can match at that thickness.
SNUG’s development journey illustrates exactly this challenge. An early attempt to use waste from a PU-aerogel composite (Pureflex) for blown-in insulation showed poor performance under high-speed recycling — the aerogel was lost in processing. The project successfully pivoted to a melamine-based composite (Agitherm) that retains its aerogel content through recycling, delivering a consistent high-performance product. This kind of nuanced material knowledge — understanding not just what a product is, but how it behaves under different processing and installation conditions — is precisely the kind of expertise that a new generation of trained workers needs to develop.
For insulation plasters incorporating aerogel granules, the challenges are different but equally specific: achieving good bonding to the substrate while maintaining thermal performance, managing application thickness, and ensuring durability under the endurance conditions that building envelopes face. SNUG’s insulation plaster with commercial aerogel has already demonstrated good lambda values and reasonable bonding. Work is ongoing to develop the CDW-based aerogel plaster formulation and validate it in demo conditions. The installer who applies these products needs to understand what they are doing and why — this is not a task for untrained operatives following generic render instructions.
99.8% of aerogel’s volume is air — giving it thermal performance that no conventional insulation material of comparable thickness can match
<10% of Europe’s construction workforce are women — in specialist plastering and heritage retrofit trades, the figure is often lower still
The heritage retrofit dimension — where the skills gap is most acute
Among the various applications for aerogel-based insulation, heritage building retrofit deserves particular attention — both because it is where aerogel’s thinness advantage is most compelling, and because it represents a sector with some of the most significant skills shortages in European construction.
Europe’s built heritage — its historic townhouses, traditional masonry buildings, pre-war apartment blocks — represents an enormous proportion of the continent’s least energy-efficient housing stock. These buildings cannot be insulated using standard external wall insulation systems without compromising their historic character, facades, or planning permissions. Aerogel-based lime plasters and renders offer a technically credible path to improving their thermal performance without sacrificing architectural integrity. A thin aerogel-enhanced render coat can deliver meaningful U-value improvement were adding 150mm of conventional external insulation would be unacceptable.
But working sensitively with historic fabric requires craft knowledge that takes years to develop. The heritage plastering and lime render trades are already facing a serious generational skills shortage across Europe, as older craftspeople retire without enough trained successors. This is a sector actively looking for new entrants — and one where the work is skilled, intellectually demanding, varied, and often takes place on some of the most architecturally significant buildings in the country.
It is also a sector with no historical reason to be male dominated, beyond the generic cultural inertia that affects most construction trades. Lime plastering, render application, and heritage conservation work require precision, patience, material sensitivity, and an ability to read a building’s history through its fabric. These are not gendered competencies. They are human ones — and a sector facing a genuine skills crisis has every incentive to recruit from the widest possible talent pool.
Lime plastering, render application, and heritage conservation work require precision, patience, and material sensitivity. These are not gendered competencies. They are human ones.
The blown-in insulation pathway — retrofit at scale
Alongside the plaster and render applications, SNUG is developing blown-in aerogel insulation for wall cavity retrofits. This application — pumping insulation granules into existing wall cavities through small-diameter holes — is one of the most cost-effective and minimally disruptive ways to improve the thermal performance of existing buildings at scale. It requires no major demolition, no significant disruption to occupants, and can often be completed in a day per dwelling.
The skills involved in blown-in cavity insulation are distinct from those of heritage plastering: drilling, equipment operation, material characterisation, cavity assessment, and quality verification. They are learnable in a relatively short training programme — weeks rather than years — which makes this application particularly relevant to adult retraining and reskilling initiatives.
Across the EU, the push to accelerate home retrofit is generating significant demand for cavity insulation work. Social housing providers, local authorities, and retrofit schemes are commissioning this work at increasing scale. The workforce being trained to deliver it is currently being formed — and the gender composition of that workforce is a choice that training providers, employers, and commissioning bodies are making right now, whether they acknowledge it or not.
Retrofit work has one feature that makes it distinctly more accessible to women than new-build construction: it frequently takes place inside occupied homes, with direct interaction with residents — many of them elderly, many of them living alone. The interpersonal dimension of retrofit work — explaining what is happening, managing disruption sensitively, building trust with householders — is something that research consistently shows diverse teams handle better than homogeneous ones. It is also a dimension that reflects well on the employers and schemes that take it seriously.
What targeted training could look like
The skills gap in aerogel installation is not a fixed feature of the landscape. It is a gap that training institutions, employers, and projects like SNUG can actively shape. Here is what deliberate action might look like in practice.
Embed aerogel modules in existing programmes
Vocational training in plastering, render application, and energy retrofit does not need to start from scratch. Adding dedicated aerogel handling and installation modules to existing curricula — with explicit outreach to female students — is a lower-cost, faster-impact intervention than creating entirely new training pathways.
Use demo buildings as training sites
SNUG’s demonstration buildings, where aerogel plasters and blown-in insulation are being installed and monitored, are natural training environments. Structured traineeships that bring vocational students — including women — onto live demo sites to work alongside experienced installers create both skills and visibility.
Partner with adult retraining schemes
Many women enter construction-related trades through adult retraining rather than direct school-to-apprenticeship pathways. Short, accredited courses in aerogel retrofit installation — marketed explicitly at career changers and women returning to the workforce — can reach a population that standard apprenticeship recruitment often misses.
Create visible role models
The absence of women in construction training imagery, case studies, and promotional material is both a symptom and a cause of underrepresentation. Projects that feature women working with advanced materials like aerogel — in videos, in publications, in social media — actively shift the perception of who belongs in these roles.
The moment aerogel has been waiting for
Aerogel has been promising to transform construction insulation for decades. The barrier has always been cost and manufacturing complexity — not technical performance, which has been proven beyond doubt. SNUG’s work on CDW-based aerogel granulates and waste-stream blown-in insulation is directly addressing that barrier, demonstrating that comparable thermal performance is achievable at significantly lower embodied energy and cost.
If that work succeeds — and the early results are compelling — aerogel insulation will move from niche to mainstream over the next decade. The volume of skilled installation work it generates will be substantial. The specialist plasterers, heritage conservation experts, and retrofit operatives who know how to work with it will be in genuine demand.
The workforce that fills those roles is still being formed. The training programmes that will shape it are still being designed. The cultural norms that will define who gets recruited, who gets promoted, and who gets to build a career in this specialism are still in flux.
This is exactly the moment to act — not after the market has formed and the incumbency patterns have hardened, but now, while the material is new, the skills are being defined, and the opportunity to do things differently is real. Aerogel insulation does not need to be another male-dominated construction specialism. It can be something else entirely. Whether it becomes that depends on the choices that projects, training providers, employers, and policymakers make in the next few years.
SNUG is developing the material. The sector needs to develop the workforce — and it needs to do so with its eyes wide open to who has historically been left out, and a genuine commitment to this time being different.
Aerogel insulation does not need to be another male-dominated construction specialism. Whether it becomes something different depends on choices being made right now.
Next in this series: Phase-Change Mortars, Energy Poverty, and the Women Retrofitting Nordic Homes
SNUG is a Horizon Europe project developing circular economy-based sustainable insulation materials and prefab solutions for building envelopes. This blog series explores the intersection of materials innovation and workforce inclusion.
By courtesy of CRES – Centre for Renewable Energy Sources and Saving
