The relationship between qualification and experience is very much either/or – half of those who have worked for under 5 years have post-grad qualification or higher compared to 10% of those who have worked over 10 years.

45% working in FM/M&E streams hold a technical (rather than academic) qualification. They tend also to have worked in the sector longer than their counterparts in the IT and networking streams – there is some correlation with ‘new’ IT staff and the deployment of IT architectural systems – staff are being imported to deal with virtualisation and the cloud. IT staff are far more likely to have a post-grad qualification or higher.

The most critical variation in workforce characteristics is between developed and developing data center markets. Data center workers in developing markets are considerably less experienced, more academically qualified and paid less:
 

Figure 1. Shows that data center workers in developing markets are less experienced, more academically qualified and paid less.
 

This situation is confirmed by the listing of the Top Ten most ‘qualified’ markets and the Top Ten most ‘experienced’ markets. Developing datacenter markets account for 6 of the top 7 most ‘qualified’ markets, whilst the more established data center markets for the top 8 most ‘experienced’ markets.

Analysis indicates that there is little variation in either levels of qualification or experience by industry sector. The educational and cultural differences between markets has far more significant impact on the characteristics of the data center workforce.