EXPERT OPINION
centre sector suffers from a lack of visibility , especially compared to the fastest-growing STEM fields like FinTech and cybersecurity . Experts believe this lack of visibility plays a significant role in the industry ’ s struggle to attract new talent , with the Uptime Institute finding that ‘ the sector is largely invisible ’, and that ‘ a low level of familiarity with data centres or the sector ’ s career paths ’ is damaging recruitment .
Little has changed in the three years since the release of Uptime ’ s 2019 report and , according to its 2022 survey , 53 % of operators had difficulty finding qualified candidates for open jobs , up
Sam Prudhomme , President , Accelevation LLc
Northern Virginia , Dallas and the San Francisco Bay Area ) in Tier II and Tier III markets , where population far exceeds local hosting and compute capacity .
Due to the current macroeconomic conditions in the US , hyperscale operators are pushing the capital expenditure ( CapEx ) required to meet growing demand onto the colocation market . Rather than build a campus , for example , the latest trend is to distribute that hub across multiple colocation data centres by buying out more capacity . This turns the immediate cost of something like a multi-billiondollar campus project into an ongoing operational expense , which looks better to shareholders .
However , this recent shift has resulted in a dearth of available capacity in Tier I markets . In 2021 and 2022 , absorption in the country ’ s largest markets ( Ashburn , Phoenix , Dallas , etc .) effectively tripled . As a result , hyperscalers are pushing out to less saturated regions , including the Midwest , Boston and Denver .
Massive multi-megawatt campuses are designed to be hyperefficient , requiring just a handful of trained staff to oversee thousands , or even tens of thousands of servers . Yet smaller , legacy facilities in Tier II and Tier III markets aren ’ t as efficient and a shift in the industry towards a greater number of smaller sites is likely to intensify the demand for staff even further .
Work without workers
For an industry so integral to the running of the modern world , the data from 47 % in 2021 . Unless steps are taken to reverse this worrying trend , the effects of the skills shortage in the US are on track to intensify even further , as a stagnating workforce contends with growing demand for workers .
Uptime predicts that , by 2025 , the industry ’ s staffing requirements will grow to 2.3 million professionals – adding 300,000 trained professionals to the sector in as little as five years .
Diversity is a key issue as well , with the Uptime Institute reporting that only 4 % of data centre operators even approach gender parity in their workforces .
More than half of the companies in the industry have a staff that ’ s 10 % women or less and one-in-five data centre teams do not employ any women at all . www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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