Poaching talent has become a default response to the data center staffing crunch, but new findings from Uptime Institute suggest the strategy is unsustainable.
Nearly half of operators (46%) report difficulty finding qualified candidates, according to Uptime Intelligence, the institute’s research and analysis practice. In addition, 37% struggle to keep the staff they already have—despite escalating efforts to buy experience from competitors rather than build it in-house. Roughly 25% of staff are being hired away by competitors (doing data center work), and 12% are being hired away by non-competitors (doing non-data center work), Uptime reported. The result, Uptime researchers said, is a shallow talent pool, growing skills gaps in operations management and electrical trades, and an industry increasingly vulnerable to the “silver tsunami” of retirements.
“People would rather poach employees a lot of the time rather than take the time to invest in training them up and upskilling them. And this is a big root of the problem, right? Because we’re having, I am sure you guys have heard the term ‘silver tsunami’, a wave of retirement,” said Rose Weinschenk, research associate with Uptime Intelligence, during a webinar discussing the firm’s findings. “And because we’re not taking the time necessarily to invest in filling the pipeline, we’re having our senior members retire, and we’re not replacing them afterwards.”
Finding, retaining, and training data center pros
Uptime’s latest analysis shows the real issue is not just recruitment, but retention and the development of competencies across IT and facilities teams.
A significant portion of lost employees are workers hired away by competitors, while only a minority leave the industry altogether. This is evidence that the sector has a strong base of people who want to do data center work, but insufficient strategies to keep them engaged and progressing, according to Uptime. At the same time, younger workers bring new expectations around flexibility, values alignment, and visible career paths, challenging operators that still rely on long shifts, rigid schedules, and loosely defined roles.
Uptime said that leaders must pivot from short-term hiring battles to long-term workforce strategies. Organizations that succeed will treat people strategy as core critical infrastructure, which is every bit as essential as power, cooling, and network resilience, according to Uptime.
“You can’t just not have a pipeline and keep drawing from the same talent pool. It’s going to wane. It’s going to dwindle, and then eventually you’re going to be at a point where you are needing to upskill a bunch of people, rapidly all at once, and you don’t have enough senior experts to really pass on that information,” Weinschenk said.
Shortages are shifting up the stack
In 2023, Uptime data showed most staffing pain at junior and mid-level roles, particularly in facilities. Senior gaps were visible but less severe. By 2024, electrical expertise had become a pressure point, reflecting a broader trade shortage just as infrastructures densified and voltages increased.
When asked which roles in the data center have the highest rates of staff turnover, respondents said:
- Operations junior/mid-level: 57%
- Operations management: 27%
- Electrical: 21%
- Cabling/IT: 20%
- Senior management/strategy: 12%
- Design: 7%
- None: 9%
By 2025, a pattern emerged: Operations management roles overtook junior positions as shortage areas, Uptime reported, marking the arrival of the silver tsunami as highly experienced managers and engineers retire without enough trained successors to replace them. As more sites are built—often in regions with limited local expertise—operators are discovering they cannot simply hire experience indefinitely, Uptime said. The pool of ready-made experts is shrinking just as demand rises, according to its data.
Poaching masks a deeper talent pipeline failure
Uptime survey data revealed how heavily the sector leans on poaching. Roughly a quarter of staff departures are employees hired away by competitors; only a small amount of workers leave the industry entirely.
Instead of investing in training and upskilling, many operators are rotating the same set of skilled people around the industry, hoping higher pay will keep them in place. Uptime said that this creates several long-term risks:
- Underdeveloped juniors: Resources flow to external hires instead of structured development for entry-level staff.
- Knowledge-transfer gaps: As senior experts retire or move, there is no robust mechanism to pass on their tacit knowledge.
- Escalating costs: Salary-based bidding wars raise operating costs without expanding the workforce’s real capacity.
Poaching may solve today’s vacancy, Uptime concluded, but it will worsen tomorrow’s shortage.
New generations, new definitions of a good job
Baby boomers and Gen X staff often prized job stability and were more likely to stay with one employer for long stretches, according to Uptime. Younger workers in Gen Z and Gen Alpha have different priorities:
- Expect work–life balance and some degree of flexibility, even in site-based roles.
- Look for employers whose ethics—including environmental values—align with their own.
- Want visible pathways to advancement, especially graduates who assume their degree should land them a leadership role.
Uptime explained that many graduates now see their first role as a stepping stone and are more likely to leave within the first few years. For data centers, which rely on 24/7 on-site coverage, this is a challenge. Yet Uptime pointed to opportunities: some shift workers prefer compressed schedules—such as one intensive week followed by a week off—provided they have input into how their time is structured. Even modest flexibility and demonstrating that preferences are taken seriously can significantly boost loyalty.
Another issue to note is that data centers have become targets in public debates over power and water use. For environmentally minded graduates, the sector may be portrayed as part of the problem, even as operators urgently need their skills to meet rising regulatory and sustainability demands.
Uptime recommends data center employers start treating workforce strategy with the same seriousness as power, cooling, and network design. By doing that they will be best positioned to attract, develop, and retain the people needed to operate and maintain data centers.
“We’ve got to try and remove this obstacle to finding people to come into the businesses and the data centers and stop having this need for individuals to come in with 50 years of experience. There are a lot of transferable skills out there. Some people are operating in adjacent industries, oil and gas, aviation, lots of engineering roles that can easily cross over into our industry,” said Matt Hawkins, director of Uptime Education, during the presentation. “Ultimately, we are building more data centers everywhere. The challenge, therefore, is making sure that we can find new people, and people poaching is not going to resolve that talent shortage or crisis.”