If you want to work in a data center, the Midwest is the place to be. Microsoft says it wants to build a facility in Iowa while Google has one up and running in Council Bluffs. Companies like Con Agra Foods and First Data Resources have centers in Nebraska.
Local schools have taken notice. Ted Tucker, an instructor with the Metro Community College in Omaha, says institutions like his are building up their IT curricula to focus on the types of expertise – like virtualization, heating/cooling monitoring, networking, and security – that companies will need to keep their data centers running.
Metro Community College is constructing a 1,900-square-foot data center, scheduled to be completed next winter. The idea is to five students hands-on training along with their degrees. To to work in these future, state-of-the-art data centers, Tucker says, new graduates will need a broader-based knowledge and skill-set, and that’s what schools are positioning themselves to provide. Understand the new technologies is important, sure. So is understanding how data centers are powered, and how they’re secured.
“What we are finding is that students have to be generalists,” says Tucker. “They have to have a broader knowledge base. It’s a totally different career than it was years ago.”
Tags: data centers, Google, Iowa, Microsoft, Nebraska
