What if the future of the economy wasn’t in Silicon Valley or New York City but in rural areas? And what if many job applicants didn’t need a college degree to get hired? 

It’s not too good to be true. 

In January, AI research organization OpenAI estimated that data centers will create hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans in the coming years. But what exactly are they?

Put simply, data centers are a rapidly growing industry of facilities used to power AI, crypto, and other state-of-the-art tools. However, the true innovation of data centers isn’t the technology they house — it’s that most of the jobs needed to staff these facilities (including roles in construction, IT, engineering, data science, etc.) won’t require a college degree. This could transform hiring and training. 

These data centers present an opportunity to shift the American workforce away from overreliance on college degrees to measure talent and potential. The diverse roles required to build and operate these facilities, combined with expanded opportunities for on-the-job training, offer employers a chance to rethink how and where they find talent. It’s a win-win when the American workforce has more opportunities for fulfillment and employers have more options for building talent. 

Yet many Americans don’t know what a data center is, let alone the range of careers they offer or the skills needed to land those jobs. To close this knowledge and talent gap, Education Design Lab’s Texas Flywheel Initiative and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Talent Pipeline Management framework are supporting the development of skills-based training pathways to launch long-term careers in data centers.

“Sometimes employers have that ‘aha’ moment of, ‘For many years, I’ve been requiring a four-year bachelor’s degree for this role in which I really don’t necessarily need a four-year degree,’” said Jaimie Francis, vice president of policy and programs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. “It’s more about acknowledging: What is a person able to do? How can we make sure that our education and training providers understand what employers are looking for, and set those learners and workers up for success?”

The implications extend beyond tech and AI. Nearly every industry should be paying attention.

Why data centers could rewire how we think about work and education 

Data centers have existed for decades, but what makes this new iteration unique is that they’re housing up-and-coming technologies — like AI, big data, and cloud-based infrastructure — that are larger in size and scope. That means they take a lot of employees to build, run, and maintain. The more streamlined the path to qualification, the faster managers can hire workers and build their skills on the job.

Though data centers can be anywhere, rural Texas has some unique aspects that make it ideal. Besides ample open space and abundant energy resources, Texas also has a high concentration of Fortune 500 companies and has attracted many transplants from other tech hubs like San Francisco. Texas currently has the second-largest concentration of data centers in the country, a number that will only grow as more energy infrastructure begins to fill out in rural areas of the state. 

Dr. Leah Ben-Ami, senior ecosystem designer at Education Design Lab, estimated that in West Texas, a single data center can employ anywhere from 50 to 150 full-time employees. These roles span every phase of a data center’s lifecycle — from construction (requiring electricians, plumbers, and HVAC technicians) to operations (demanding tech-focused expertise in cybersecurity, data science, IT, engineering, and management) to long-term maintenance and expansion (which may call for employees specialized in energy infrastructure and construction)..

Many of these jobs don’t require a four-year college degree. Certifications (such as OSHA HAZWOPER), targeted skills training (like the short-term tech courses from Per Scholas), and hands-on apprenticeships can all equip workers for these roles.

The “dream,” Ben-Ami said, is for employees to get hired through these alternative, skills-focused pathways and learn and develop new abilities on the job, allowing them to advance. 

“How cool would it be if the people who built your data centers were retained and then maintained the site they helped build?” she said.

This model benefits both employers and job seekers: Candidates gain a more accessible pathway into meaningful careers, while employers access talent that’s better aligned with their needs. But making this shift means challenging the long-standing norm that equates a costly, time-consuming college degree with a person’s skills and potential.

So, how can both potential data center workers and employers begin to shift toward these more technical, hands-on qualifications? 

Enter Education Design Lab’s Flywheel Initiative. The program focuses on connecting potential workers, employers, and training providers across Texas to build these professional pathways. 

“We need stakeholders within this ecosystem to work together, and right now they’re quite disparate,” Ben-Ami said. “You can have rural commutes of two-plus hours, which makes it difficult to collaborate, communicate, and work together.” 

The data center industry is largely in development: Employment in U.S. data centers grew by over 60% from 2016 to 2023, with Texas seeing the second-highest rate of growth behind California. So, the Flywheel Initiative is still working to develop the best ways to provide skills-based training, connect job applicants with employers, and foster sustainable in-house growth. 

So far, that has included two gatherings where the organization assembled around 60 employers and workforce development groups from the area. 

“We bring them all together, working cohesively,” Ben-Ami said. “This really helps the employers to produce the talent that they need, because right now we don’t have the amount of talent that’s required to staff these facilities. We want our rural learners to have pathway opportunities that may not have been available to them before.”

Education Design Lab is looking to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, whose Talent Pipeline Management (TPM) strategies provide the blueprint for helping employers lean into hiring that emphasizes applicants’ unique skills and experiences above their degrees. 

To do this, the group focuses on six core areas:

• Working with employers to identify what skills and roles their workforce is lacking
• Projecting job demand, including how many of each type of role will be needed, where, and in what time frame
• Ensuring that job descriptions and hiring requirements clearly reflect the essential skills needed for success
• Identifying potential untapped sources of talent that could provide a new pipeline of applicants
• Fostering collaboration among hiring managers, education leaders, and credentialing and training providers
• Continuously partnering with managers to ensure their strategies are building a more skilled, productive, and satisfied workforce

“We’re trying to ask employers the question, ‘What is the pain point that is keeping you up at night?’” said Francis. “Is it unfilled job openings? Is it retention challenges or trying to upskill your existing workforce? Are you trying to expand talent pipelines so that your workforce is more reflective of the communities in which you serve?”

The Flywheel Initiative is working to adopt the same process. 

“We are moving toward a skills-first paradigm shift,” Ben-Ami said. “You can have all the credentials and connections in the world, but do you have the skills needed to get the job done? What are transferable skills that you may have mastered?”

Ben-Ami said that they are working with local data center employers to clarify the skills required for various roles, a question she characterized as “a completely different way of thinking. This requires some learning, unlearning, and relearning. It requires a lot of communication.”

While both the Flywheel Initiative and Talent Pipeline Management primarily focus on helping employers create nontraditional pathways into data center careers, the responsibility doesn’t rest with employers alone. Prospective job seekers must also take proactive steps to prepare themselves. That includes reflecting on their interests, skills, and long-term goals — and actively researching job requirements, certification programs, and other opportunities that might qualify them for roles.

For example, at the Flywheel Initiative’s second event this February, a college student from Dallas approached the organization to share their background in bitcoin programming and their search for a job that could put those skills to use.

“We should be able to offer that to them,” Ben-Ami said. “Clarifying the skills needed and the timing of when they’ll need it will be super helpful.”

Francis summed up the goal of skills-focused hiring with a metaphor recalled from a colleague: 

“We don’t put up ‘steel wanted’ signs and expect steel to show up at our front door the next day in the exact location that we asked for, with the exact specifications and correct quantity,” she said. “But we do that with talent all the time. We need to make sure we’re not relying on degrees as proxies for what we need to know: What is this person capable of doing? And how can I ensure that I can put them on a pathway so that they can continue to advance and gain skill sets within this role?”

How a movement from rural Texas could revitalize the economy as a whole 

The data center boom is quickly approaching: Google has invested $1 billion to expand its Dallas data centers, while Microsoft recently announced plans to build two more in San Antonio. Within months, development will begin on a $100 billion facility in Abilene as part of the Stargate Project. 

“There’s such a ripe opportunity for tech development, and why you would want to potentially invest in moving to Texas,” Ben-Ami said. 

Still, there’s a long road ahead as the local economy in West Texas shifts to prepare for, build, develop, and eventually maintain centers of both a size and innovation scarcely seen before. 

It’s also important to recognize that the technologies powering these data centers are continually evolving, so it will likely take several years of experimentation and learning to pinpoint the most critical skills and the most effective ways to train for them.

“The challenge that we have is a lack of consistency across what skills are required for these roles that we’ve never hired in because these technologies are completely new,” Ben-Ami said. “This is a future projection of what skills we think we might need.”

However, once that skills-first model begins to reach the tipping point, there could be huge implications for other industries to become more open to applicants with nontraditional backgrounds — not just AI and tech. 

Education Design Lab has recently worked with partners in Florida in the health care sector — including those in radiological technology, surgical technology, and medical assistance — using the same processes the organization is working with in the West Texas data centers.

“We’re trying to identify where students may have transferable skills,” Ben-Ami said. “Let’s say I don’t complete my nursing program. Life happens. But maybe I can move into one of these programs and continue to use my skill set. Then you’ve created an ecosystem of talent. So there are some interesting ways that we can start to build and layer skills that allow for employers to get the talent they need faster.”

Francis believes that the example data centers set could have even wider-reaching effects, with the potential to revitalize the U.S. economy as a whole. 

“Our workforce is not growing, it’s shrinking,” she said. “There are so many examples of employers out there that are willing to do the hard work that it takes to change our behaviors in terms of hiring practices that we’ve always relied on. Those are strategies for the past. They are not well suited for the dynamic economy that we have now. Skills-based hiring can be a really useful tool that can help employers persist in this economy, and hopefully, really thrive as well.”

The Texas Flywheel Initiative is supported by Stand Together Trust, which provides funding and strategic capabilities to innovators, scholars, and social entrepreneurs to develop new and better ways to tackle America’s biggest problems. 

Learn more about Stand Together’s efforts to transform the future of work and explore ways you can partner with us.