Executive Summary:
- Employers need to move quickly to upskill their workforce in sustainability knowledge and skills – but for data centre operators, where simply retaining staff is difficult enough, this may be a headache
- Operations staff day-to-day activities can easily be focused around sustainability, such as ensuring heavier workloads are being run when renewable energy is more readily available, and testing generators for optimised fuel usage. It is all a case of joining the dots
Microsoft’s report on closing the sustainability skills gap – ‘helping businesses move from pledges to progress’ – leaves organisations in no doubt as to what they have to do.
“Employers must move quickly to upskill their workforce through learning initiatives focused on sustainability knowledge and skills,” the report notes. “This will require support from a variety of learning partners, including educational institutions, vocational education providers, apprenticeship programs, and online training providers.”
For data centre operators, sustainability is understandably the watchword. The race is on, certainly in Europe, to make data centres climate neutral by 2030; and the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, signed by more than 100 data centre operators, has set various initiatives and working groups in place to deliver this ambitious transformation.
If you’re an operator whose main focus is in keeping the lights on and the books balanced, however, it’s tempting to kick this skills can down the road. After all, it is a tough enough process retaining employees right now, never mind upskilling them. The Uptime Institute reported in its 2025 Global Data Centre Survey that almost two thirds of data centre operators polled found difficulty either in retaining staff, or finding qualified candidates, or both.
As Data Centre Insight noted at the time, this figure is relatively unchanged over the past couple of years – but you can’t put it off. So, what can you do?
The truth is: it’s not so bad. There are plenty of resources available which outline best practices for ensuring your facilities are as sustainably-focused as possible. Ramboll’s comprehensive ‘Developing Sustainable Data Centres’ whitepaper, published in September, is one such example. This is not just for the present, but to ensure your future data centres are built with ‘sustainability, biodiversity and circularity in mind from the very start’, as Ed Ansett, global director of technology and innovation, puts it.
This knowledge base ranges from understanding how embodied carbon can be reduced in data centres, to how biodiversity and embodied ecological impact (EEI) can be measured and how to fully understand a data centre’s biodiversity footprint. This is not just for operations and facilities staff, either. Biodiversity metrics are just one element that needs to be incorporated in sustainability reporting which, if you’re in a management role, is a task which will likely land on your desk.
What about the operations staff walking the floor? The good news is that their day-to-day responsibilities and activities can easily be sustainability-oriented if the dots are joined. They will be ensuring heavier workloads are being run at certain times of the day when renewable energy is more readily available. They will be in charge of power sourcing and backup systems, testing generators for optimised fuel usage and supporting the transition to battery energy storage systems (BESS). They will be on top of hardware lifecycle management, ensuring decommissioned hardware is recycled responsibly and coordinating with vendors who offer circular economy programmes.
Key to it all is ensuring your efforts are codified. Standards and certifications, such as BREEAM in Europe, or ISO 14001 and 50001, are key. You can have the most sophisticated dashboard, but it will mean little if your data quality doesn’t add up. As a blog from Submer explains: “The journey to a fully sustainable data centre is a long one, but one that brings a wide variety of benefits with it.” Measure what you treasure – and in so doing, you will find the gap starts to close.
