In a bid to plug a "major skills gap" in the datacentre industry, the professional association Data Centre Alliance (DCA) has launched a bootcamp to lure unemployed graduates to work in the industry.
The DCA claims that the data centre industry is the fastest growing area of the UK economy, and that despite this it has had major difficulties finding suitable recruits to work in the area.
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"Amazingly, the average age of people in the data centre industry is 50 something and there's a major skills shortage coming in this vital industry," said DCA's executive director Simon Campbell-Whyte.
Some of the largest organisations in the world including internet giants Facebook, Amazon and Twitter rely on data centres for their operations, but many graduates are unaware of their importance or are not attracted to the proposition of working in a data centre.
The DCA hopes to change this and encourage graduates as well as others to up-skill themselves to be considered for data centre roles.
"We've worked with our many data centre operator members to come up with 'Data Centre Bootcamp'. We hope this bootcamp will give many unemployed graduates, and some of the highly able people now being forced out of our armed forces, the extra skills they need to become credible interview candidates for data centre employers," Campbell-Whyte said.
The bootcamp is being run at the University of East London's Dockland's campus and is free to attendees. It is being sponsored by training company C-Net, and data centre firms Telecity and Telehouse.
DCA said 21 people will attend the 10-day intensive course, the majority of which are out-of-work Londoners including graduates of the University of East London, Queen Mary and Middlesex University. In addition, there are three forces leavers and a PhD student from Leeds attending the course.
"Both Telecity and Telehouse run massive data centre complexes in Docklands and are hoping that at the end of the bootcamp they will have some of their best interview candidates in years," Campbell-Whyte said.
Computing's Data Centre Summit 2013 is on Tuesday 24 September in London and is FREE to attend for end users. The summit will feature top speakers from the likes of Facebook, Morgan Stanley and the BBC.
