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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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike Meyer is the Managing Director of Portman Partners and supports firms in the digital infrastructure space to find the best leadership talent. He has more than 27 years of experience across digital infrastructure, data center, IT, and telecoms businesses. As a seasoned director, founder, and entrepreneur, Meyer has an established track record of evaluating and developing talent, as well as building successful, cohesive teams globally.
Having worked in the United Kingdom, Europe, South Africa, and across Africa, he has developed in-depth knowledge of diverse, multicultural, and multinational teams. Meyer has honed what is needed to find and foster the best leadership talents.
