How the evolving world of data centres has created a skills gap

At present there’s a skills shortage in the UK Data Centre industry, which left unchecked will present serious resourcing problems in the future.

The problem isn’t lack of candidates; it’s lack of experienced people to fill the roles. The reasons for this are wide ranging, but the most prominent is the speed at which the industry has evolved.

20 years ago, businesses were not generally tech focused. IT would have been deployed as a back-office function, and everyone who needed access to it would have been in the same building. The Internet wasn’t widely used, and mobile or video data didn’t even exist. Fast forward to today, and for practically any company operating in 2014, technology is at the centre of everything they do.

Data centres have become the modern workshop of today’s digital world. With everything transitioning to the digital and online space, new mega bits and bytes are being created at an exponential rate – all of which needs to be saved somewhere. As a result of this increase in digital information, the number of data centres has increased to meet it, and in turn so has demand for employees required to run them.

The Knowledge Gap
The data centre has moved away from being purely a property focused industry. Building and managing data centres is becoming a science in itself; and those involved have been required to expand their knowledge on devices across cooling, networks and storage as well as their understanding of how these can be deployed effectively. The need for those in the data centre to be technology experts has increased exponentially.

One issue that exists is the knowledge gap between fresh faced graduates – applying for jobs straight out of university – and the data centre veterans who have spent years acquiring the knowledge and expertise working at the coal face of the industry.

There is not a specific degree with the right mix of operations and engineering from universities. Graduate degrees only make up around 40-50% of what’s required for employees to work effectively in the data centre industry, while the remainder can only be obtained through on the job training. The ability to optimise risk, demonstrate resilience and have a commercial mindset are not generally things that form part of the curriculum.

The Impact on Business
The reality of this is that businesses have had to change the way they recruit to ensure this gets taken into account, while at the same time investing in training to ensure employees have the right skills required to do their jobs.

The ideal data centre employee embodies a balance of operational, technological and commercial ability and knowledge – a hard combination to find from someone straight out of university. Power, land and size constraints also mean creativity is essential, both in terms of designing data centres and being well versed in the tools needed to produce more energy efficiency. To find these skills it’s important to adapt the recruitment process to identify these attributes.

Today, data centre companies are starting to take on a mix of experienced and inexperienced employees to foster an environment of knowledge sharing, where the experienced can pass on their expertise to the new employees. So retaining the quality of the personnel you already have and recognising the role they play is vital.

Increasing the Importance of the Data Centre
Given the growing role of the data centre in business and IT spend taking up larger proportions of company budgets, the position of the data centre manager needs to be reevaluated and more widely recognised to reflect the impact they now have on business.

Their intimate knowledge of a company‘s data centre capabilites means they should be given more senior management positions and have a seat at the table to ensure broader decisions based on business strategy are rooted in their unique IT reality of the business.

Ultimately, having the right attitude and a willingness to learn, being flexible and having an ability to think outside the box are crucial to success in this industry. If businesses can identify and hire employees with a combination of these skills, then 80% of the battle is already won. By nurturing the knowledge that workforces already have, businesses can stimulate an organic growth of learning throughout the Data Centre Industry.