The data center skills crisis

Wanted: IT professionals skilled in running data centers. It's an up and coming field with plenty of opportunity. The problem is that there isn't enough IT talent to fill these jobs, according to Rick Ancona of PricewaterhouseCoopers, a professional services firm.

"The problem is, not that many people out there right now are versed in the data center of today," he tells CIO magazine.

He says the people applying for these jobs don't understand multiple disciplines as well as the facilities infrastructure. And that causes a real dearth of talent in the field. Virtualization experts are especially hard to come by, says Michael Bullock, founder and CEO of Transitional Data Services, a data center consulting firm.

"It'd be awfully nice to find people available who are skilled in multiple disciplines, but it's hard enough finding anyone who knows how to work with virtual servers or storage alone," he tells CIO magazine.

Andreas Antonopoulos, senior vice president with Nemertes Research, says his organization studied 120 IT organizations and found widespread shortages of the right kind of IT skills. In the study, 60 percent of organizations reported trouble finding IT personnel with the right skill sets; 45 percent of respondents said they ran into shortages of IT talent in application development and 30 percent couldn't fill positions in storage and networking.

For any company thinking about building a data center, think long and hard, evaluate the workforce and figure out how to find IT talent to make it work. You may have to train the staff yourself or pay a premium to get the right people on the job.

For more on data center staffing:
- see this CIO magazine article

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