By John Crescenzo, Director of Product SME Advanced Manufacturing at Per Scholas
Technology companies are pouring massive amounts of money into the infrastructure needed for artificial intelligence, cloud computing, edge deployments, and digital transformation initiatives. According to McKinsey, we can expect to see a $7 trillion global investment in data centers by 2030.
This might sound like an enormous barrier to the future of technologies that will drive the economy. Raising enough capital to meet technological goals might not be the hardest aspect of building the future, though.
While executive leaders are expected to oversee infrastructure expansion, they must also build a workforce with skills required to manage and maintain technologies that are evolving rapidly. If we fail to address workforce challenges, companies will struggle with operational inefficiencies, delayed deployments, increased downtime exposure, and diminished competitive advantage.
For those of us who work on building talent pipelines into these roles, the workforce constraint is becoming just as consequential as the capital one.
The State of Critical Infrastructure Today
The era of digital transformation has already made data centers foundational to critical sectors like healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, government, and transportation.
As digital dependence grows, so do expectations for uptime, resiliency, cybersecurity, and sustainability. I've talked to countless business leaders who can barely manage their existing data centers. They need more workers trained in the latest technology. The question they keep coming back to is where those workers are going to come from.
AI-Driven Capacity Expansion
As I hinted at earlier, existing data centers can't handle the increased demand from AI, which is why we see companies investing billions in hyperscale data center projects.
Additionally, we know that today's data centers can't handle the needs of newer technologies. Our new data centers require advanced GPUs, liquid-cooling systems, and higher power requirements.
But companies can't just wait for these facilities to get built. Construction will take years. The tech leaders who get a head start now will likely retain dominance over the decades to come. These leaders are eager to invest, but they don't have many options to consider. JLL's 2025 midyear report shows that data center "vacancy will remain restrictive at least through 2027."
If you're waiting for a new facility to get built, don't expect to take control of the data facility for at least a year after construction starts.
Power and Sustainability Pressures
Communities around the world are worried about how the increased number of data centers will affect the environment and electricity costs. It's a reasonable concern, especially given that EPRI says "U.S. data centers will consume between 9% and 17% of national electricity by 2030, up from roughly 4–5% today. That range is approximately 60% higher than EPRI projected in 2024, driven by a surge of newly announced and under-construction facilities."
Powering hyperscale data centers while protecting the environment and consumers will require creative thinking and technologies. At the very least, companies will need experts in electrical engineering, energy management, sustainability reporting, and infrastructure optimization to find solutions.
Increasing Operational Complexity
Building training programs for these roles means understanding exactly what they require, and the range is broader than most people assume. Most successful data centers coordinate across critical power infrastructure, advanced cooling, cybersecurity, automation, AI-enabled monitoring, and compliance, all at once.
As those disciplines converge, facilities become increasingly difficult to staff, and a single gap in the team creates exposure across the entire operation. Today's clients won't tolerate that level of disruption, so you must have trained professionals who know how to perform their jobs.
The Talent Challenge: A Growing Strategic Risk
We know about the technical and physical barriers that stand between today's emerging tech and a successful future. But we need to think about much more than how they will build data centers quickly and power advanced processors. The workforce gap is just as consequential and considerably harder to close on a short timeline. What follows is what the data shows, and what I hear consistently from employers building or operating critical infrastructure.
An Aging Workforce
Some of the most experienced professionals in the tech industry will retire within the next few years. When they leave their jobs, they'll take decades of institutional knowledge with them.
The roles most exposed to this transition include critical facilities engineers, electrical and mechanical specialists, operations managers, commissioning professionals, and reliability engineers.
JLL's data puts the pace of that transition in perspective. About 33% of the technical workforce is at or nearing retirement age, a number the firm expects to double as demographic trends play out. Younger workers are available, but the qualification gap is significant: only about 15% meet the minimum job requirements. Expect it to take about 60 days to fill an open position in an environment where operational coverage gaps have direct consequences.
Limited Industry Awareness
Many of today's students and entry-level candidates don't have a clear picture of what critical infrastructure roles actually involve. Unlike software engineering or cybersecurity, these careers rarely surface in the conversations that guide workforce decisions. These are well-compensated, technically demanding positions that don't require a four-year degree, and that's a detail most candidates never encounter.
Microsoft describes the Critical Environment Technician role as centered on "the safety and reliability of the facility's physical infrastructure," involving equipment maintenance, environmental monitoring, and troubleshooting. That's a meaningful, accessible career that simply isn't reaching the people best suited for it.
Competition Across Industries
Employers building data centers and critical infrastructure aren't competing only within their own sector. The same professionals with electrical, mechanical, networking, automation, and cybersecurity expertise are being recruited by utilities, renewable energy providers, manufacturing organizations, defense contractors, and telecommunications providers simultaneously.
Bill Kleyman hit the nail on the head when he told IEEE Spectrum that "the challenge is not simply the absolute number of workers available, but the timing and intensity of demand." Multiple industries scaling at the same time, drawing from the same pool, creates a pressure that conventional hiring approaches weren't built to handle.
Why Traditional Recruiting Is No Longer Enough
Many organizations are still approaching this the way they always have, assuming qualified candidates already exist in the market and will respond to the right compensation, and the data suggests that assumption is running into its limits.
Uptime Institute's 2025 survey found that 55% of operators increased salary spending over the past 12 months, with operations management and junior-to-mid-level staff seeing the largest increases. Shortages persist regardless. Paying more to compete for a constrained pool redistributes workers rather than growing the pipeline.
The organizations making progress in this environment recognize that workforce development has to be part of the business strategy. Successful organizations are shifting from recruiting talent to building it. That requires long-term investments in education, apprenticeships, internships, mentorship programs, and internal career development pathways.
The Critical Infrastructure Partners in Success virtual panel brought together workforce leaders from TEKsystems and Per Scholas, alongside alum Aasif Allen, who went from our Data Center training program to a full-time role at Microsoft, to discuss these challenges and share strategic recommendations for leaders. Watch the full recording here.