Simon Galletti, who recently went through Vertiv’s graduate program, shares his views on how to encourage more new talent into the data center sector.
It’s fair to say that when I accepted a spot on Vertiv’s graduate program a few years ago now, it wasn’t with any high-minded ideals about tackling the skills crisis in the data center 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 is 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 that 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 than data center 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 center organizations surveyed admitted to problems recruiting and retaining staff. That figure was up more than six percent when compared to 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 center experts from across the globe, we also considered the long-term staffing challenges. The results were worrying.
Globally, 16 percent of participants expect to be retired by 2025, exacerbating an already problematic talent shortage. In the United States, that number is an alarming 33 percent.
As the 2025 report concludes, “With the labor market already tight in some key markets, the potential to lose 16 percent 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 center 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 center 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 Internet of Things (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 standardized/normalized designs aligned to the rise of prefabricated modular (PFM) data centers. If more data centers can be deployed in a standardized 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 standardized from a mechanical and electrical 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 centers to large cloud or colocation providers also helps with this process of standardization/normalization. Hyperscale, cloud, and colocation providers can more efficiently manage more workloads, servers, and square footage of data center whitespace per staff member.
And lastly, the emergence of more intelligent data center management software including data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tools enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) also promises to automate more maintenance tasks and eliminate others by using a predictive approach, help skilled staff manage more capacity per head.
Those tools are still in development, and 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 Institute survey showed that more than 70 percent of respondents believe AI will reduce the need for data center staff over the next five years and beyond.
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 timeframe 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, there also needs to be continued government and private sector focus on investment in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (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 Center Re-Transformation 2019 Conference hosting by Data Centre Alliance 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 center industry. The conference included talks from ex-military personnel who have technical skills-sets that make them well-suited to the data center industry. There are even specialist organizations 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 center sector. But even if that was true, given the pace of change in robotics and AI, who knows if the data center industry will even still need me or any of us 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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