The Great Talent "Suck"

At the start of the colo industry, they key cities coincidentally also happened to be NFL cities. These cities were selected because they also had great internet connectivity, lots of fiber, a talent pool and in most cases incentives by taxing authorities and power companies to locate in those areas.  Probably no area of the US has done more to attract these data center beasts than Loudoun county Virginia. This area is the fastest growing data center market and has been for some time servicing Alexandria, Washington D.C, Bethesda and all things government and east coast.  Followed by Dallas, Phoenix, Denver, Portland, Seattle, of course the San Francisco bay area, Atlanta and a few others.  

One of the first data center collegiate level curriculum was developed to train those in the northern VA area, and has proven to be very successful.  Others exist outside the US.  But what about the rest of the US?  A few degrees have popped up around the country, but there isn’t a nationwide data center program.  One problem agreed upon in the industry is that there is a definite talent shortage not only for today’s staffing needs, but also moving forward as current employees near and enter retirement.  

According to the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT), by 2026 3.5 million computing related job openings are expected, but only 17% could be filled by U.S. computing bachelor’s degree recipients.  In 2017, 26% of the computing workforce were women compared to the 74% that are men.  Programs that start kids coding early are helpful, but coding is only a portion of IT.  In a recent State of the Data Center survey by AFCOM, it was noted that cloud and colos are not the only data centers growing.   In fact, 45% of respondents said that they were planning new data center builds proving that cloud and colo facilities are tools, not necessarily end all be all destinations for every company.    

In the “great talent suck”, talent is being attracted to the cities where the education and hyperscalers, colo providers and cloud operators are congregated literally sucking the talent out of other cities.  While there are numerous IT related degrees out there, very few are centered around data center construction and operations.  This leaves certifiers of technical education for the digital infrastructure industry with the bulk of the burden not answered by on the job training in those other cities where enterprises continue to operate and build their own data centers. Quite often, these certifiers and remote educators provide for remote attendance via collaboration enabled classrooms. But is this enough to address talent shortfalls?

In the data center space, many career opportunities exist.  To start, engineers and architects design the spaces.  Construction personnel, electricians, fabricators construct the spaces. Low voltage technicians, cabinet installers, flooring installers populate the whitespaces with kit.  Then come the networking, server, software and security teams to populate the cabinets.  These trades are outside of traditional “coding” people think of when it comes to IT. Beyond construction follows operations and management for the facilities.  These jobs happen literally all over the world in every single city in some capacity. 

Another wave of data center talent need is emerging to support edge compute in tier 3, 4 and rural locations. Much of this demand is being driven by autonomous vehicles, but that certainly is not the only application. 5G is a stepping stone to supply bandwidth, but no one is delusional enough to assume that this will be a permanent fix to bandwidth needs moving forward.   But it does raise a point that the talent isn’t located in those places either.  

In general, we need more. More education in the data center industry, more understanding of what a data center even is and what it does, more talent….more!  We need to attract young talent and cross train talent.  We, as an industry, need to remove barriers to work by allowing remote work and realizing that people need to be evaluated based on their skills not necessarily those that have 4 year degrees. A lot of jobs can be served by trades.  We need to build some relocation expenses into our budgets.  We need to build diversity in our work forces.   We need to realize that there isn’t a one size fits all, and that data centers are happening in more places than the “colo” cities.   Mostly, we just need to attract and RETAIN talent in the data center space by all means necessary.  

For information on data center related programs and scholarships available, I suggest reaching out to the Infrastructure Masons (they have committed to 50% of their scholarship dollars going to women), AFCOM, 7x24Exchange and other organizations.  Further, look into internships with those industries mentioned above.  The jobs are everywhere, let’s fill them!