Can Uber And The Military Help Solve The Data Center Labor Shortage? Find Out At Bisnow’s DICE Data Center Event

Demand for data centers continues to rise even as a global shortage of skilled employees to run facilities persists. According to the Uptime Institute, data center staffing needs are predicted to grow globally to nearly 2.3 million employees by 2025, up from the 2 million reported in 2019. 

This poses a major challenge for data center operators, who need to implement new hiring strategies in order to meet the significant need. At the same time, growing calls for sustainability initiatives are forcing operators to re-examine their power and cooling systems and search for ways to run facilities more efficiently. 

How can data center operators find the workers they need to properly staff their facilities? And how can new technologies be used to help operators manage growth, costs and efficiency? 

These questions and more will be addressed at Bisnow’s National DICE Ops and Cooling Event in Dallas on March 2. Register here. 

Sarah El-Taher, sales director at Chekhub, a workforce enablement platform, will be giving a presentation at the event titled “How Uber and the U.S. military can help the data center industry with its labor shortage.”

Bisnow spoke with El-Taher to learn more about why she chose to be a part of this particular event and what the industry can do to solve its staffing needs. 

Bisnow: What inspired you to speak at Bisnow’s National DICE Ops and Cooling Event in Dallas?

El-Taher: I’ve actually presented this talk once before at the 7x24 Midwest fall conference last year. I was encouraged to do it here with Bisnow because of how much these ideas resonated with people and inspired them to think differently about a very critical topic in the industry. I was pretty surprised by all the positive feedback and engagement, so I decided I should share it with more people.

Bisnow: What topics will you speak about at the event? 

El-Taher: I’ll be talking mainly about how we can start solving our skilled labor shortage or at least a new way of thinking about how to solve it. Before I joined Chekhub last summer, I was working on the construction side for five years and well aware of their skilled labor shortage. After moving to the day two side of the data center industry, I quickly learned they are facing the same hiring challenges.

Bisnow: Can you describe your role at Chekhub and what projects you’re working on?

El-Taher: My title is director of sales, but Chekhub is a fast-growing startup, which actually makes me a jack-of-all-trades. So, in addition to heading up sales, I lead business development, marketing, and I support account management, client onboarding and product development. It sounds like a lot, but I love the startup life because I’m never bored and always learning. 

We’re working on some really cool projects right now with a few data center owner-operator clients, and we’ve recently partnered up with the Nomad Futurist to launch the Nomad Futurist Academy. Something at the heart of our mission here at Chekhub is supporting the onboarding of new talent to the industry and educating new audiences about the wide world of data centers. 

Bisnow: What do you think are the driving factors behind the labor shortages in the data center industry? How can Uber and the U.S. military help?

El-Taher: For starters, I personally think our society does an unacceptable job at encouraging career paths in the trades. There’s nothing wrong with a college education, of course. Plenty of us go that route. But we do not equally support tech schools, apprenticeship programs and trades training with young people during the time we expect them to choose their career. 

Now, couple that with the fact that the data center industry itself is fairly elusive to both young people and people transitioning careers, and boom, we have ourselves a shrinking hiring pool. So the challenge is, how can we widen that pool? 

The military recruits tens of thousands of young people every year with no experience or education. But they turn them into effective, efficient, consistent soldiers in a matter of weeks. Uber has hundreds of thousands of drivers, and they don’t require experience in the city they drive in or even need to speak English. 

As a society, we place a lot of trust in both of these organizations by the sheer expectation that they're going to show up, do their job and do it right every time. So how do they have the widest hiring pools in the country and still execute with precision every day? And what can we learn from that and apply to our industry? You can find out at my talk.

Bisnow: What are you most excited about experiencing at the DICE event?

El-Taher: I’ve always felt the DICE events have great content, so I’m excited to soak up all the panel discussions and hear the latest ideas and accomplishments of my peers. And I love visiting Texas. So I’m excited to meet with people in person who are attending the event and experience Dallas while I’m in town. 

To register for the March 2 event, click here. 

This article was produced in collaboration between Chekhub and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.