John Booth, DCA Advisory Council Board Member & Technical Director at The National Data Centre Academy, argues that unless the sector stops relying on poaching and starts building a serious talent pipeline, its growth ambitions will be put at risk.
The data centre sector globally is in a period of rapid growth, with new projects being announced daily. On April 1 alone, 860 MW of new capacity was announced, comprising two projects: one in Germany (500 MW) and the other in Texas, US (360 MW).
In the UK, there is a lot of media speculation regarding power and water use, but there is a far more important problem that needs to be addressed: staff.
The Uptime Institute Global Data Centre Survey 2025 report, in its staffing section, stated, “The data center industry has faced shortages of staff and skills for more than a decade. This year, Uptime’s annual survey indicates that the labor shortfall has not worsened. This small ‘victory’ may be partly due to improvements in training and recruitment strategies.”
It went on to say, “Poaching of workers from other data centers is a widely used and popular approach but is only a short-term strategy to meet an organization’s most urgent staffing requirements. The industry’s labor pool is already constrained, and hiring from competitors only fuels higher worker turnover, driving up labor costs and diverting resources from programs that could result in a stronger long-term talent pipeline.”
The data indicates that 46% of those polled stated that “we are having difficulty finding qualified candidates for open jobs,” 37% said “we are having difficulty retaining staff”, with 25% saying that staff are being poached by competitors and 12% for non-data centre work.
Interestingly, just over a third (35%) of companies reported ‘none of the above’.
Stumps
Globally, this problem consists of three stumps. The first is the shortfall in existing data centres.
In late March 2026, there were 9,862 vacancies in the UK for jobs with ‘data centre’ in the job description, according to LinkedIn.
The second is the quadrupling of data centre capacity with over 100+ new data centres. With the AI Growth Zones and other new digital infrastructure being announced almost daily, the amount of people required to design, build and operate data centres will only rise in the coming years.
The final ‘stump’ is the impending grey tsunami, where up to 50% of existing staff will be retiring by 2030. That’s only four years away.
Scoreboard
The recent TechUK report, Foundations for the future – How data centres can boost UK economic growth, published in November 2024, estimated that data centres support 43,500 jobs in the UK economy, and that if the UK can increase its data centre capacity from 10% (in 2024) to 15% (2025–2035), this could result in an additional 58,400 jobs in construction and operations. This does not include any wider economic activity, such as transmission grid upgrades and directly employed personnel researching or developing AI. This would bring the total staffing requirement to just over 100,000, and a significant proportion will be new to the industry.
Well, from the amount of data centre construction projects announced in 2025, this figure is likely to have been seriously underestimated. We conducted an assignment to forecast data centre capacity out to 2040 with one of the Catapults, and our data indicated, in 2025, 2 GW of current capacity, 2 GW of shovel-ready projects (finance, power and planning in position), and 2 GW of early-stage projects, meaning that one of the three requirements listed above was missing. Fast forward to 2026, and data provided at a fringe event prior to Data Centre World in March showed that the figures had changed.
Night Watchman
The revised figures have seen an increase in early-stage projects from 2 GW in 2025 to 8 GW in 2026. These figures may mean that the additional 58,400 jobs cited in the TechUK report are seriously under-reported. Taking the grey tsunami into account removes another 21,750.
If we assume that each MW of capacity requires two jobs, and probably more, perhaps three, in the data centre supply chain and service sectors, that could mean an additional 16,000 direct and 24,000 indirect jobs, giving us a grand total of 120,150 jobs.
The Academy System (Graduates/Apprenticeships)
Not too long ago, companies would ‘invest’ in attracting and developing new talent for their organisation. But the data centre sector is a relatively ‘new’ industry and, it could be argued, and often is, that most people ‘fall’ into the industry via other routes: time-served electrical and mechanical engineers, IT staff, and, for admin positions, people from other management roles.
As can be seen by the data from Uptime Institute, the situation is becoming more acute and, if it continues, could jeopardise the future roll-out of data centres globally. We need to do better in attracting and retaining people to work in the sector, and I know that there are companies recruiting graduates and apprentices, but it is very ad hoc and not coordinated. We should look to other sectors to see how they attract, develop and retain their staff.
Reacting…
It is clear that we need to create a pool of talent that can: a) replace our existing greybeards; and b) deal with the rapid expansion in personnel required. The current industry approach is ‘fatally flawed’ – we simply cannot continue to poach staff from each other. Something needs to change.
I used the word ‘reacting’ because I was drawn to a recent publication from the Nuclear Skills Delivery Group (NSDG), its National Nuclear Strategic Plan for Skills. This is a cross-industry body with representatives from the MOD, DESNZ, AWE, Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems, Royal Navy, Babcock, Submarine Delivery Agency, NDA, Great British Nuclear, UKAEA, Office for Nuclear Regulation and EDF to deliver the skills required to support both the military and civilian sector.
We need a broad range of people to work in a wide variety of roles, with the right skills to keep the UK safe and energy secure, over multiple decades.
“That is why in August 2023, the Government set up the Nuclear Skills Taskforce to bring together government, employers and academia to turbo-charge our efforts to meet these nuclear skills growth opportunities. The objective of the Taskforce was to develop a skills strategy to support the significant growth expected across a range of roles in the civil and defence nuclear sectors in coming years – setting up the UK’s nuclear sector for future success.
“That work culminated in the announcement in March 2024 that the Government is partnering with industry, including BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, EDF and Babcock, to invest at least £763 million by 2030 in skills, jobs and education. The investment will help the sector fill 40,000 new jobs by the end of the decade.”
The data centre sector needs 120,150 personnel to support the jobs that are potentially required, and we do not have a credible plan. In fact, we do not have a plan at all.
Out!
In March 2025, we held the ‘Data Centre Skills – Big Tent’ at the National Data Centre Academy with a view to creating a data centre apprentice or degree course that could be delivered by universities and colleges to create that pool of talent that we so desperately need. While the discussions were fruitful, the follow-up was not, and I take some of the blame for that.
But that was then and this is now. With the quadrupling of data centre projects, we must now set our sights higher. I am proposing that the Government set up a Data Centre Skills Taskforce to bring together government, employers and academia to turbo-charge our efforts to meet these data centre skills growth opportunities.
The objective of this Taskforce would be to develop a skills strategy to support the significant growth expected across a range of roles in the data centre sector in coming years – setting up the UK’s data centre sector for future success.
The National Nuclear Strategic Plan for Skills and its contents can be easily adapted for the data centre sector: the National Data Centre Strategic Plan for Skills.
In
So, who is in?
We are happy to host taskforce activities at the National Data Centre Academy and to reach out to the Government, data centre operators and the supply chain via our extensive networks, but it needs to be funded. The Government is partnering with the nuclear industry to the tune of at least £763 million by 2030. Our data centre ambitions, the 8GW by 2040, will require £15 billion in construction and MEP alone, not including the IT. Perhaps it’s time for the sector to put its hands in its pockets and begin to develop a strategic plan, because the alternative will not do any of us any good.
