Webinar Recap | Advance Your Data Center Career - Pathways to Certification

Written by Sara Laws

Summary

There is a shortage of skilled workers and new talent entering the data center industry. Meanwhile, those interested in beginning a data center career don’t always know what to do first. Even for professionals already working in the industry, the career path is not always clear. It can be difficult to discern where to earn certifications and which training is fundamental for career growth.

To address these problems, AFCOM hosted a webinar about how to advance your data center career through training and certifications. Joseba Calvo, Managing Partner at EPI Americas, presented a framework to help attendees navigate their path to data center certification. A panel of industry leaders – Joseba Calvo, Michelle Reed, Jacques Fluet, Bill Winsininski, and Matthew O’Hare – developed the discussion, sharing their experiences with continuing education and EPI certification programs. With its new partnership with EPI Americas, AFCOM is offering a 15% discount on EPI training and certification programs.

Key Takeaways

• Training and certifications based on international standards are important for credibility and transferable skills
• A combination of hands-on experience, vendor-agnostic training, and standards certifications produces well-rounded data center professionals and teams
• Existing certifications like EPI’s courses are helpful foundational certificates that confer credibility on those wanting to enter the industry or grow within it
• Companies should provide consistent internal training programs and career development for every employee, and this training should be based on industry standards, not just vendor products
• Data centers need to engage students and talent pipelines early to address the workforce shortage. More awareness of the industry and its career paths is needed
• Data center courses, certifications, and career pathways should be connected to high school, community colleges, and universities to attract the interest of younger students and provide training for them
  

EPI Courses Offer Training Pathways

“We need more people and we need to improve the performance and the skills of people already working in the industry,” said Joseba Calvo, Managing Partner at EPI Americas, as he began his presentation.
Calvo has built more than 200 modular data centers and has brought new talent into the industry to improve data centers.

He highlighted a crucial insight: “The only thing more expensive than education is ignorance.”

To develop this point, Calvo displayed two key questions:

Typically, a CFO will ask: What if we train our people and they LEAVE?

Theoretically, it’s expensive to train people.

But the CEO may then ask: What if we don’t train people and they STAY?

It is a risk for every person and every center if industry professionals aren’t trained, noted Calvo. And because of how the industry is shifting, these points are especially relevant (see our recent webinar on “The New Era of Security”).

Data center operators must consider key questions related to ignorance and trust, and for Calvo, these questions can be grouped around a center’s Product, Process, and People:

• Product: How do I know that my facilities and my center are operating according to baseline expectations? How do I know what that baseline is?
• Process: You have infrastructure, but how do you manage the data center? What are your processes and procedures?
• People: How do you make sure that you have people with the right skills and competencies?
  

Assessing Competencies

To avoid risks and downtime, you must know the competencies of your workers and ensure they know their own competency levels. Calvo suggested that individual professionals should consider where we are on this scale:

1. Unconscious Competence (you don’t know your own ignorance and won’t be able to react)
2. Conscious Incompetence (you know that you don’t know; you need to grow)
3. Conscious Competence (you can manage things properly and minimize human error)
4. Unconscious Competence (very skilled; you know things by heart; very competent → a level of competence we aspire to)

“With humility,” Calvo said, “we can achieve excellence.” To avoid human error, “people need training so that the right level of expert with the right competencies is addressing the proper problem.”

Calvo pointed out the other key element here: “it’s also very important to have the metrics showing what resources you actually have.” He offered an analogy: “It’s not a question of ‘I have the Tom Brady of my data center.’ Okay, great. Tom Brady is amazing, but what happens if Tom Brady retires? Or is sick? What do you do?”

Metrics should show the level of expertise of each professional and which competencies they have available at what time. With this information, you can complete the proper operations, procedures, and processes to avoid human error.

How to Build Competency

Calvo then raised relevant follow-up questions: With all the hundreds of types of training programs out there, where do we turn? Which direction do we take? He voiced another assumption that might resonate: “Everybody does this training, so it won’t benefit me.”

Calvo countered this. “‘Does everybody do it?’ – this isn’t the right question,” he said. For him, our questions should actually be, “What is my current position? What is the future position I want to achieve?”

Identifying answers to these questions will help you grow. And for data center owners and leaders, these questions will also help you keep valuable people: “If you have good people, they want to learn. If you offer training, those people will stay because they get more training and more professional career development.”

Calvo then introduced the competency and training matrix used by EPI and now offered with a discount by AFCOM for members. The framework shows which skills and competencies correspond with each position, and which skills and competencies each worker needs to advance into other positions. It also shows how competencies align with specific tasks.

“With this,” Calvo said, “you can build a Data Center Career Plan for each person, each job position on your team–and there are more than 38 of these in a given data center.” Calvo displayed a sample Career Plan for a Data Center Manager, showing the work that she does; her responsibilities; the KPIs; the main tasks; the required training that this person should take; and additional “Added Value” courses that would give her the option of excellence.

Calvo recommends doing this for all positions in a given center. “And this goes for those we want to bring into the data center industry.” Developing a Career Plan for new data center professionals shows them that “we have a plan; we have training for you; and we will help you grow.”

Towards the end of his presentation, Calvo highlighted three free resources for AFCOM members:

1. DCCF (Data Centre Competence Framework)
2. Data Center Training Quick Guide
3. DCPT (Data Center Career Planning Tool)

Panelists' Personal Experiences with Education and Training

The team of speakers then began to discuss their own experiences with education and training.

Matthew O’Hare detailed his career evolution from the early 2000s, when his focus was on telecommunications. His work led him to obtain his RCDD, and over time, he shifted toward a more holistic approach to building design and construction, emphasizing efficiency. He then focused on obtaining a LEED AP credential. As he learned more about the comprehensive aspects of data center management, it became essential to understand every facet of the building process, including the shell, operations, and efficiency.

Here, O’Hare said, a program like the one offered by EPI is crucial because it is standards-based and covers the holistic aspect of data centers. He started with the CDCP and eventually turned to the CDCS. This program helped him to grasp the necessary calculations and other technical aspects of data center engineering.

Bill Winsininski noted that the experience of working in this profession isn’t just the data centers in which you work; “it’s about the data centers of your customers and the applications of your customers, how it resonates with your data center, how you mitigate that risk.”

“I fell in love with this industry by going on data center tours and seeing how all the disparate components fit together–and then learning how to take that information to mitigate risk with tenants,” Winsininski added, urging that if you touch the data center in any capacity, “starting some of these classes will help you gain more confidence with your narrative and will help you understand how all these things fit together.”

O’Hare reiterated the importance of standards-based training beyond vendor-based training. “These vendor certifications on a product and how it works within the holistic data center environment are important,” said O’Hare, “but they don’t get into how the other systems play into it; you’re not hearing from other systems manufacturers.”

For Jacques Fluet, understanding standards is crucial, even though they can be quite dry and technical. “I had a career change between the telecom industry and the data center industry about five years ago,” Fluet continued. “For me, it was great to attend the classes just to learn the new lingo and to understand the terms–and like Bill [Winsininski] was saying, to be able to ask the right questions with the right words when talking to people. Because data centers have their own language, you have to learn those new things every time you change industries.”


AFCOM has made a full recording of this webinar available to AFCOM members. To view it, simply click here.