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How I did my bit (unintentionally) to tackle the data centre skills crisis

Simon Galletti •

Simon Galletti, who recently went through Vertiv’s graduate programme, shares his views on how to encourage more new talent into the data centre sector.

It’s fair to say that when I accepted a spot on Vertiv’s graduate programme a few years ago now it wasn’t with any high-minded ideals about tackling the skills crisis in the data centre industry.

To be honest, although I’d done my homework, I had no real idea that a skills gap existed.  

Even if I had, I would’ve probably seen a lack of rivals as a positive thing – for me at least.

There’s a lot of competition for the best jobs out there so knowing that skilled staff were in short supply would have been a plus in some ways.

The truth is my main motivation – like most graduates - was finding a well-paid and interesting job that might develop into a career, and that I could still be passionate about in the years to come.

However now I’ve spent some time in the industry, I’ve become more familiar with the challenges most companies face in recruiting and retaining skilled staff – especially in engineering. (Technical sales is a little different to data centre management but it still requires solid engineering knowledge.)

Take for example the results of this year’s Uptime Institute Industry Survey which revealed that more than 60 percent of the data centre organisations surveyed admitted to problems recruiting and retaining staff. That figure was up more than six percent on 2018.

Vertiv has also done its own recent skills analysis. As part of our landmark Data Center 2025 research – which surveyed more than 800 data centre experts from across the globe – we also considered the long-term staffing challenges.

The results were worrying. Globally, 16% of participants expect to be retired by 2025, exacerbating an already problematic talent shortage. In the U.S., that number is an alarming 33%.

As the 2025 report concludes. “With the labour market already tight in some key markets, the potential to lose 16% of the workforce to retirements could impede the ability of organizations to adapt to changing requirements. On the other hand, it is also driving more operators to normalized designs and the application of rapid deployment configurations that require less intellectual capital to deploy and support.”

The second point is an interesting one. Data centre technology is continuing to evolve and that could have positives and negatives from a staffing perspective. A lack of skilled staff could eventually threaten continued growth in new data centre capacity especially in emerging regions where there is a serious lack of skilled staff. The predicted rapid increase in new edge sites – aligned with billions of new IoT devices coming online over the coming decades – could also be limited by a lack of staff.

However, as the 2025 report points out there are a couple of counter trends which could lessen some of the impact of the skills shortage. The first is a move to more standardised/normalised designs aligned to the rise of prefabricated modular (PFM) data centres. If more data centres can be deployed in a standardised way, and manufactured off-site in factory conditions, that could help to reduce the specialist staff required to build but also operate the site. If more facilities are standardised from a mechanical and electrical (M&E) perspective than it’s easier for a smaller pool of skilled staff (perhaps outsourced facilities management services providers) to manage multiple sites.

Secondly, the migration of more workloads away from bespoke, smaller enterprise data centres to large cloud or colocation providers also helps with this process of standardisation/normalisation. Hyperscale cloud and colo providers can more efficiently manage more workloads, servers, and square meters of data centre whitespace per staff member.

And lastly, the emergence of more intelligent data centre management software including AI-enabled data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) tools also promises to automate more maintenance tasks – and eliminate others with a predictive approach - within the data centre and help skilled staff manage more capacity per head.

Those tools are still in development – Vertiv is very active in this area too – but as the skills crisis begins to bite harder, then some of the impact will be lessened by AI. The 2019 Uptime survey showed that more than 70 percent of respondents believe AI will reduce the need for data centre staff over the next five years and beyond.

But while it’s good to know that technology shifts could mitigate some aspects of the skills shortage, there’s still the short to mid-term to consider. Encouraging more women into the industry is obviously critical from a diversity perspective but would also help meet the skills shortage. Longer term, thee also needs to be continued government and private sector focus on investment in Science Technology and Engineering (STEM) and encouraging more pupils to take up the subjects.

So, while I might not have set out to help tackle the skills crisis, it’s great to be able to help by encouraging others to get involved. I was lucky enough to be invited to speak on this topic at the recent Data Centre Alliance Re-Transformation conference in Manchester which included several in-depth debates and presentations on skills

That event highlighted another potential solution, encouraging people from other professions with relevant skills to enter the data centre industry. The Re-Transformation summit included talks from ex-military personnel who have technical skills-sets that make them well suited to the data centre industry. There are even specialist organisations such as Salute Mission Critical that are helping to drive that process.

Overall, I’d like to be able to say that I plan to spend the rest of my career in the data centre sector. But even if that was true - given the pace of change in robotics and AI - who knows if the data centre industry will still even need me, or any of us come to that, in 40 years’ time? Luckily, the ongoing high levels of innovation and growth that we are seeing in this industry will still require skilled humans, and that seems unlikely to change any time soon.

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