AFCOM Potomac Teams Up with NOVA Community College to Fully Fund 20 Data Center Internships

This June, AFCOM’s Potomac Chapter joined forces with Northern Virginia Community College to kick off its annual summer internship program, designed to bridge the gap between higher education and the data center industry. At its Internship Orientation event, 20 students were selected to be full-time interns, all of whom will spend the summer working at 18 different sponsoring companies in the data center community.

Five years ago, only one intern participated when AFCOM inaugurated its Summer Internship Program. Now, according to program organizers Stuart Dyer and TJ Ciccone, both of whom serve leadership roles in the AFCOM Potomac Chapter, the program has grown by nearly 100% year-over-year since its inception—thanks to tight coordination of the AFCOM Education Committee, comprised of Phil Baroody, Pat Lally, and Caroline Teitelbaum. This team of five volunteers their time and effort to raise money through sponsorships, organize documentation, and create templates to track interns’ learning objectives throughout the program’s duration.

In their press release, the AFCOM Education Committee acknowledged that the success of AFCOM Potomac’s Summer Internship Program is also largely due to its collaboration with Northern Virginia (NOVA) Community College. The college “continues to be on the leading edge of providing unique employment opportunities to students through its DCO program, which focuses on data center operations,” said Ciccone.

“NOVA’s Information and Engineering Technology (IET) Division has been fortunate to partner with such an effective and passionate chapter of AFCOM,” said Jack Bidlack, Director of Strategic Initiatives for IET at NOVA. “The Potomac Chapter is actively involved with our DCO programs by sponsoring more than 24 paid internship opportunities over the last four years for our students, with the number of internship offerings doubling year-over-year. Our partnership with the AFCOM Potomac Chapter has furthered student achievement, connected the college with multiple industry partners, and provided equitable pathways for students towards an exciting innovative career.”

Building Bridges

This collaboration between AFCOM Potomac and NOVA CC to encourage and enable more students to join the data center community serves to counteract the skills gap and talent shortage issues that have affected the industry—and the world of tech at large. In AFCOM’s 2023 “5 Bold Predictions” whitepaper, industry experts predicted that this year would be dominated by hiring challenges, even while many skills remain in high demand. In particular, the report acknowledged the difficulties that data center companies have faced in adding diversity to their workforce: the current attrition rate for women in data centers is 67%, for example, and a third of the current data center workforce will gray out by 2025.

In an article by Data Center Knowledge, AFCOM Program Chair Bill Kleyman said that a critical method to reduce this skills gap is by “creating awareness of the data center sector among the younger generation” via extensive outreach to universities. The article also mentions that current employees at data center companies may leave their jobs due to a lack of budget for training and other professional development opportunities.

AFCOM Potomac and NOVA CC’s Summer Internship Program seeks to overcome these two key obstacles by not only bringing data center companies to the university’s doorstep, but also by reducing any costs accrued during a student’s education and internship. Through AFCOM’s Wendy Darling Scholarship, any NOVA CC student who enrolls in the ENE195 (Introduction to Data Center Operations) course can attend at no charge. Upon enrollment, students are also eligible for entry into the Summer Internship Program, which is an 11-week, $20/hr. paid internship within the data center community. Program leaders Dyer and Ciccone remarked that approximately 70% of students who are accepted into the internship program have since found full-time employment in the industry.

This program shows no signs of stopping. In June, AFCOM raised enough money from the community to fund both the Summer Internship Program and Wendy Darling Scholarship Fund at $25,000 for another year, and have even considered establishing an endowment in the near future. According to Dyer and Ciccone, the largest supplier of funding to the program is NOVA Community College, whose grant program has enabled AFCOM to scale this program year after year. Other sponsors include Aligned Data Centers, CompuDynamics, Coresite, CPG, CyrusOne, Iron Mountain, Primary Integration, Sabey Data Centers, Stack Infrastructure, Digital Realty Trust, Google, Iconix, IES, NTI, WE Bowers, B&S Site Development, Prime Data Centers, and Vantage Data Centers.

“I get an overwhelming amount of positive feedback about the NOVA CC program, the sponsors that support us, and from those that want to be involved,” said Ciccone. “Every conference I attend, meeting I go to, and panel I watch, everyone is talking about the need for more data center talent. The next step would be to make this sort of experience, from both a schooling and internship perspective, national. Many organizations right now are working with their local colleges to try and do just that."