# # #
By Stuart Newman, Business Development Manager at Apx Data Centre Solutions
The data centre sector forms the invisible backbone of modern life: the phone you’re holding, the video you’re streaming on the commute to work, every financial transaction, AI query and cloud-stored document. It all relies on complex physical infrastructure operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
In spite of the role they play in our ‘always-on’ digital economy, the general understanding of the infrastructure inside these windowless warehouses remains a mystery. But it’s a predicament with severe consequences: the next generation simply doesn’t know we exist or what opportunities lie inside those walls. And that lack of awareness is having a major knock-on effect, with the industry facing an increasingly urgent challenge to secure the talent pipeline to keep pace with the exploding demand.
With this year’s National Data Centre Day focusing on the theme of ‘education’, it provides us, as industry professionals, with an opportunity to focus on how we recruit, train and demystify the sector for the next-generation. Because right now, our biggest bottleneck isn’t the pace at which technology is changing. It’s perception and access.
You only have to take a cursory glance at our news outlets today to see just how people feel about data centres. Around the globe, they’re lambasted for being monolithic, featureless warehouses filled with complicated computer racks.
Because of the picture that’s (rightly or wrongly) being painted, there’s a widespread assumption that working within one requires a specialised computer science degree or an elite background in software engineering.
It’s a narrow perception, often perpetuated by the mysterious aura that tends to hang over data centres, that turns away bright young school leavers and skilled tradespeople before they’ve even considered applying.
At the same time, traditional educational pathways and standard apprenticeship frameworks often struggle to keep pace with the relentless speed of innovation in critical infrastructure. The result? A system where newcomers see only blockers rather than entry points, leaving a gap precisely where structured, hands-on training should be.
By focusing primarily on formal academic credentials, we obscure a fundamental truth: the digital world is not built solely on lines of code. Instead, it’s built on practical problem solving, high spec mechanical expertise and, crucially, on traditional trade disciplines.
In fact, we’re starting to see the latter play an important role in shoring up our industry. A recent Data Centre Dynamics Workforce report reaffirms this, by noting that organisations in the sector are “increasingly looking to adjacent technical infrastructure and utilities sectors to fill roles”.
And for me, this is something I’ve seen first-hand.
While education-based pathways remain an important route to driving interest in the next generation of data centre professionals, more than a quarter of DCD’s respondents cited low industry awareness as a blocker to entry.
You only have to look at the official National Data Centre Day’s recent social media campaign to know that we’ve got an awareness issue. The series, which marked the industry’s second anniversary as National Critical Infrastructure, was called ‘then and now’ and aimed to document the realities of what school-age children aspire to become as adults.
Throughout the campaign, we’d seen posts about aspiring primary school teachers, pop stars and theme park enthusiasts, engineers, soldiers and athletes, among others. I, myself, wanted to be a motorsport engineer.
Besides it being a great tool to show the range of roles those individuals now hold in the industry, it’s a campaign that’s demonstrated two things: the first, that none of them knew this industry, or the roles within it, existed at a younger age. The second, just how many transferable skills exist across other industries and how interests can crossover.
All of this begs the question: without awareness at school level, how can we expect young minds to take an early interest? It starts, I think, with operators and suppliers being more open-minded; being willing to open doors to candidates with non-linear backgrounds and alternative skill sets.
Take my own route into the industry. Having started my career as a plumber before transitioning into commercial sales and business development within the data centre sector, I’ve seen first-hand how directly these core trade skills crossover into high-tech environments.
A modern data centre is, at its heart, an exceptionally complex engineering site. Keeping mission-critical servers online requires sophisticated liquid and air cooling networks, precise environmental controls, high-voltage power distribution and continuous physical maintenance.
Skilled tradespeople such as electricians, HVAC technicians, pipefitters, plumbers and mechanical engineers already possess the core competencies these facilities need to function smoothly. So much so, it’s no surprise to see that, according to the DCD Report, as much as 19% of the workforce is being pulled from ‘expanded industries’ like utilities.
They understand pressure systems, fluid dynamics, fault diagnosis and strict safety compliance. Yet, despite possessing the exact real-world experience our industry desperately craves, many skilled workers rule themselves out of the running simply because they don’t realise how applicable their abilities are.
Beyond technical knowledge, non-technical roles across site operations, client account management, compliance and project logistics rely heavily on soft skills that are honed in entirely different sectors: think hospitality managers who excel under pressure and deliver exceptional client service, aviation cabin crew trained in rigorous safety protocols and crisis management, a logistics coordinator who wrangles complex schedules and inventory control or, perhaps, an event planner who knows how to manage vendor ecosystems and strict deadlines.
The reality though, is that none of these professionals are likely to even consider a data centre as their next logistical step, despite their core strengths being exactly what today’s modern facility management and data centre teams need.
This is precisely why we must challenge how we view candidate pools. Right now, according to the DCD Report, around 29% of the workforce is currently drawn from critical infrastructure. And this is where we risk pigeon-holing ourselves; when we look too closely at sectors that mirror our own, we aren’t creating a broader talent pipeline. We’re simply shuffling people within a very similar ecosystem.
To build genuine, long-term resilience, we must look beyond obvious structural parallels.
If we’re to bridge the growing skills gap, the industry can’t afford to wait for conventional education models to catch up. We must take an active role in demonstrating that university isn’t the only gateway to high-growth careers.
To truly inspire the next-generation, I think three fundamental changes need to happen.
We must demystify the facilities themselves. Industry leaders must open their doors to schools, colleges and trade academies to show students the tangible reality of these modern facilities. We’re starting to see this happen in pockets around the industry, primarily in an effort to bring down the proverbial walls and slowly break down the growing, negative perception building around the market.
In fact, just the other day, I was reading a story about DataVita boss, Danny Quinn, inviting Greens co-leader, Ross Greer and Dr Kat Jones, director of Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS), down to his facility in North Lanarkshire to help start that ‘demystification’ process and answer directly some of the criticism we’re seeing.
We’ve also got companies like Telehouse, a leading global data centre service provider, tapping into pop culture to bridge the gulf in public knowledge and tackle common misconceptions by creating an animated avatar character named ‘DC’.
But demystification also means getting out from behind our perimeter fences and into schools. A fantastic step in this direction is the newly-launched Data Centre STEM Ambassadors Programme, an initiative established by National Data Centre Day alongside AVK and STEM Learning. By connecting industry professionals directly with students aged 8 to 16 through classroom talks and mentoring, it gives us a structured route to show young minds what powering the digital world actually looks like. It’s an initiative that we, at Apx, are eager to throw our weight behind, because brokering these sorts of discussions and opening the doors, no matter the audience, is crucial to building a better future for the industry.
Once we’ve broken down the walls, we then need to look at the pathways to getting the next generation trained up. In any industry, starting from scratch can be extremely daunting. We need to put pathways in place to train new colleagues, providing them with the hands-on support needed to give them the confidence to seamlessly transition into critical infrastructure roles.
We also need modular, hands-on training initiatives that recognise existing baseline capabilities, whether from a mechanical trade, customer-facing role or emergency service background, and quickly bridge the gap to data centre application. By establishing clear, cross-skilling bootcamps and structured earn-while-you-learn pathways, we can lower the barrier to entry and show non-traditional talent that they already hold the building blocks for a successful career in critical infrastructure.
The data centre sector sits at the absolute centre of global progress, but our continued growth relies entirely on the people behind the physical infrastructure.
Moving the needle requires us to be braver in how we recruit. By opening our facility doors, broadening our search parameters beyond traditional degrees and valuing transferable soft and trade skills, we can transform what was once a hidden, super specialised sector into one of the most accessible, rewarding career paths of the modern era.
If we want the next generation to take a chance on us, we have to be willing to take a calculated chance on them. It’s time to stop waiting for talent to find us and start showing them exactly where they fit in.
# # #
Stuart Newman is the business development manager at Apx, specialising in bespoke Critical Cooling equipment engineered for both current and future operational demands.
The post Why The Data Centre Industry Must Rethink Its Talent Pipeline appeared first on Data Center POST.
TL;DR Low public awareness and narrow misconceptions create a major hiring bottleneck for the data center industry as it struggles to build a talent pipeline to keep pace with exploding demand. Academic degree requirements obscure practical needs, turning away school leavers and tradespeople even though facility operations rely heavily on mechanical expertise and traditional trade
The post Why The Data Centre Industry Must Rethink Its Talent Pipeline appeared first on Data Center POST. Read More Data Center POST
# # #
By Stuart Newman, Business Development Manager at Apx Data Centre Solutions
The data centre sector forms the invisible backbone of modern life: the phone you’re holding, the video you’re streaming on the commute to work, every financial transaction, AI query and cloud-stored document. It all relies on complex physical infrastructure operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
In spite of the role they play in our ‘always-on’ digital economy, the general understanding of the infrastructure inside these windowless warehouses remains a mystery. But it’s a predicament with severe consequences: the next generation simply doesn’t know we exist or what opportunities lie inside those walls. And that lack of awareness is having a major knock-on effect, with the industry facing an increasingly urgent challenge to secure the talent pipeline to keep pace with the exploding demand.
With this year’s National Data Centre Day focusing on the theme of ‘education’, it provides us, as industry professionals, with an opportunity to focus on how we recruit, train and demystify the sector for the next-generation. Because right now, our biggest bottleneck isn’t the pace at which technology is changing. It’s perception and access.
You only have to take a cursory glance at our news outlets today to see just how people feel about data centres. Around the globe, they’re lambasted for being monolithic, featureless warehouses filled with complicated computer racks.
Because of the picture that’s (rightly or wrongly) being painted, there’s a widespread assumption that working within one requires a specialised computer science degree or an elite background in software engineering.
It’s a narrow perception, often perpetuated by the mysterious aura that tends to hang over data centres, that turns away bright young school leavers and skilled tradespeople before they’ve even considered applying.
At the same time, traditional educational pathways and standard apprenticeship frameworks often struggle to keep pace with the relentless speed of innovation in critical infrastructure. The result? A system where newcomers see only blockers rather than entry points, leaving a gap precisely where structured, hands-on training should be.
By focusing primarily on formal academic credentials, we obscure a fundamental truth: the digital world is not built solely on lines of code. Instead, it’s built on practical problem solving, high spec mechanical expertise and, crucially, on traditional trade disciplines.
In fact, we’re starting to see the latter play an important role in shoring up our industry. A recent Data Centre Dynamics Workforce report reaffirms this, by noting that organisations in the sector are “increasingly looking to adjacent technical infrastructure and utilities sectors to fill roles”.
And for me, this is something I’ve seen first-hand.
While education-based pathways remain an important route to driving interest in the next generation of data centre professionals, more than a quarter of DCD’s respondents cited low industry awareness as a blocker to entry.
You only have to look at the official National Data Centre Day’s recent social media campaign to know that we’ve got an awareness issue. The series, which marked the industry’s second anniversary as National Critical Infrastructure, was called ‘then and now’ and aimed to document the realities of what school-age children aspire to become as adults.
Throughout the campaign, we’d seen posts about aspiring primary school teachers, pop stars and theme park enthusiasts, engineers, soldiers and athletes, among others. I, myself, wanted to be a motorsport engineer.
Besides it being a great tool to show the range of roles those individuals now hold in the industry, it’s a campaign that’s demonstrated two things: the first, that none of them knew this industry, or the roles within it, existed at a younger age. The second, just how many transferable skills exist across other industries and how interests can crossover.
All of this begs the question: without awareness at school level, how can we expect young minds to take an early interest? It starts, I think, with operators and suppliers being more open-minded; being willing to open doors to candidates with non-linear backgrounds and alternative skill sets.
Take my own route into the industry. Having started my career as a plumber before transitioning into commercial sales and business development within the data centre sector, I’ve seen first-hand how directly these core trade skills crossover into high-tech environments.
A modern data centre is, at its heart, an exceptionally complex engineering site. Keeping mission-critical servers online requires sophisticated liquid and air cooling networks, precise environmental controls, high-voltage power distribution and continuous physical maintenance.
Skilled tradespeople such as electricians, HVAC technicians, pipefitters, plumbers and mechanical engineers already possess the core competencies these facilities need to function smoothly. So much so, it’s no surprise to see that, according to the DCD Report, as much as 19% of the workforce is being pulled from ‘expanded industries’ like utilities.
They understand pressure systems, fluid dynamics, fault diagnosis and strict safety compliance. Yet, despite possessing the exact real-world experience our industry desperately craves, many skilled workers rule themselves out of the running simply because they don’t realise how applicable their abilities are.
Beyond technical knowledge, non-technical roles across site operations, client account management, compliance and project logistics rely heavily on soft skills that are honed in entirely different sectors: think hospitality managers who excel under pressure and deliver exceptional client service, aviation cabin crew trained in rigorous safety protocols and crisis management, a logistics coordinator who wrangles complex schedules and inventory control or, perhaps, an event planner who knows how to manage vendor ecosystems and strict deadlines.
The reality though, is that none of these professionals are likely to even consider a data centre as their next logistical step, despite their core strengths being exactly what today’s modern facility management and data centre teams need.
This is precisely why we must challenge how we view candidate pools. Right now, according to the DCD Report, around 29% of the workforce is currently drawn from critical infrastructure. And this is where we risk pigeon-holing ourselves; when we look too closely at sectors that mirror our own, we aren’t creating a broader talent pipeline. We’re simply shuffling people within a very similar ecosystem.
To build genuine, long-term resilience, we must look beyond obvious structural parallels.
If we’re to bridge the growing skills gap, the industry can’t afford to wait for conventional education models to catch up. We must take an active role in demonstrating that university isn’t the only gateway to high-growth careers.
To truly inspire the next-generation, I think three fundamental changes need to happen.
We must demystify the facilities themselves. Industry leaders must open their doors to schools, colleges and trade academies to show students the tangible reality of these modern facilities. We’re starting to see this happen in pockets around the industry, primarily in an effort to bring down the proverbial walls and slowly break down the growing, negative perception building around the market.
In fact, just the other day, I was reading a story about DataVita boss, Danny Quinn, inviting Greens co-leader, Ross Greer and Dr Kat Jones, director of Action to Protect Rural Scotland (APRS), down to his facility in North Lanarkshire to help start that ‘demystification’ process and answer directly some of the criticism we’re seeing.
We’ve also got companies like Telehouse, a leading global data centre service provider, tapping into pop culture to bridge the gulf in public knowledge and tackle common misconceptions by creating an animated avatar character named ‘DC’.
But demystification also means getting out from behind our perimeter fences and into schools. A fantastic step in this direction is the newly-launched Data Centre STEM Ambassadors Programme, an initiative established by National Data Centre Day alongside AVK and STEM Learning. By connecting industry professionals directly with students aged 8 to 16 through classroom talks and mentoring, it gives us a structured route to show young minds what powering the digital world actually looks like. It’s an initiative that we, at Apx, are eager to throw our weight behind, because brokering these sorts of discussions and opening the doors, no matter the audience, is crucial to building a better future for the industry.
Once we’ve broken down the walls, we then need to look at the pathways to getting the next generation trained up. In any industry, starting from scratch can be extremely daunting. We need to put pathways in place to train new colleagues, providing them with the hands-on support needed to give them the confidence to seamlessly transition into critical infrastructure roles.
We also need modular, hands-on training initiatives that recognise existing baseline capabilities, whether from a mechanical trade, customer-facing role or emergency service background, and quickly bridge the gap to data centre application. By establishing clear, cross-skilling bootcamps and structured earn-while-you-learn pathways, we can lower the barrier to entry and show non-traditional talent that they already hold the building blocks for a successful career in critical infrastructure.
The data centre sector sits at the absolute centre of global progress, but our continued growth relies entirely on the people behind the physical infrastructure.
Moving the needle requires us to be braver in how we recruit. By opening our facility doors, broadening our search parameters beyond traditional degrees and valuing transferable soft and trade skills, we can transform what was once a hidden, super specialised sector into one of the most accessible, rewarding career paths of the modern era.
If we want the next generation to take a chance on us, we have to be willing to take a calculated chance on them. It’s time to stop waiting for talent to find us and start showing them exactly where they fit in.
# # #
Stuart Newman is the business development manager at Apx, specialising in bespoke Critical Cooling equipment engineered for both current and future operational demands.