The leading area of expertise that is particularly critical and yet difficult to hire for is operations and management. There is a growing need for new skills in an increasingly hybrid IT environment and those who are hired have to learn new skills for this hybrid world.
The demand for skilled data centre professionals has been outstripping supply for many years and more than 60% of industry leaders have huge concerns about a lack of suitably qualified staff. This is driving a rise in the salaries for those with the necessary skills and experience which has driven an increase in operational costs.
In its recent survey, The Uptime Institute found that more than half of those interviewed had more than 20 years in the industry and women made up less than 6 percent of the workforce in the data center. There is growing consensus among industry leaders that the future success of the data centre will depend on building a diverse workforce.
The report highlights that successful strategies tend to focus on staff training, including cross-training existing personnel for both IT and facilities skills, which is essentially merging the two roles. This has been particularly attractive to organisations with a cloud-first strategy.
You can read more about the report here