The Workforce Challenge

Solving labor shortages in the data center industry

The persistent demand for data center capacity continues to create a need for larger facilities, bringing with it an unyielding need to fill the ever-increasing number of job openings being created at these growing businesses.

Growth is an excellent problem to have. However, the industry needs to take notice of what lies in front of it regarding the potential labor shortage.

Professor Rabih Bashroush, of Digital Infrastructure and the Director of the Enterprise Research Lab at the University of East London, has produced data that shows precisely what is happening in the data center labor market.

To establish a holistic view of the data center workforce and trends, Professor Bashroush’s research team has filtered the data of millions of LinkedIn users in the data center’s world to discover their characteristics.

The threshold

The data shows a shortage in as little as five to 10 years—The typical distribution curve of the global workforce shows that the bulk of employees are in the training stages of their careers. The highest number of employees have two years of experience, and after this two-years the number of employees in the global workforce  gently drops.

However, Professor Bashroush’s 2020 data set shows us that the reverse is true for the data center industry.

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