Blackstone
Investing in talent
QTS’s engagement with Career Pathways began in 2023 with an internal assessment of the maturity of the organization’s talent and workforce operations — or, in Blackstone’s words, a flash diagnostic.
“The outcomes of the diagnostic allow companies to take a bird’s-eye view of their programs, policies, and procedures to understand what they might start or continue to advance their objectives of hiring, retaining, and advancing untapped talent,” a Blackstone spokesperson wrote to Business Insider.
Fortunately, QTS had already been focusing on the talent shortage, offering internships through Year Up, a nonprofit that places young adults without college degrees in a yearlong, professional internship, and SkillBridge, a Department of Defense program to help find internships for service members who are about to leave the military.
But Blackstone’s diagnostic found that the company still needed to find and train more candidates who could fill the specialized technical positions required for a data center. So it created its own internal program called the Data Center Academy, which helps train workers on the skills necessary for the growing industry.
Recruitment efforts have focused on critical operations employees who work within data centers and monitor and manage the facilities’ infrastructure, hardware, and various technologies, as well as more general corporate services roles that range from finance to customer support.
So far, the firm has placed five Data Center Academy cohorts in eleven markets. Cohorts include seven or eight employees whose members are offered direct career mentorship from senior employees within the company.
QTS also has a growing leadership development for promising employees with bachelor’s degrees and four or more years of work experience. The program gives employees nine to eighteen months to try other roles in the business, leading to a new job once they’ve found their fit.
The firm also offers more traditional student-focused summer internships.
Since 2021, the company’s new talent sources have yielded 100 hires that are new to the industry, making up 8% of QTS’s employee base. Of the employees that have gone through QTS’s apprenticeships, 73% were converted to full time roles, and 15% of them were promoted in their first year of full-time employment.
Tracking data, such as the number of apprenticeships converted to hires, is a key part of the program because it helps the firm calculate its ROI and justify these programs’ contributions to the business.
But not all contributions are so easy to quantify.
Blackstone
At the end of the internship, he was hired full-time into a critical operations role. Despite not yet having gotten that degree in cybersecurity, he was able to work and excel alongside colleagues with degrees.
He said that QTS’s Data Center Academy turned him from a novice to a professional, “jumpstarting” his career.
“I had no previous data-center experience or knowledge, but I was able to get hands-on and classroom knowledge, which set the foundation of me being successful in my career right now,” Dawon said at the Career Pathways summit.
The training has continued in his full-time role and appears to be paying off. He told the audience at the Career Pathways summit that he is now being promoted after his first year, an announcement that was met with raucous applause from the non-profit, human resources, investors, and media that dotted the crowd.
Dawon said the Data Center Academy taught him both hard and soft skills, such as public speaking and the ability to navigate a corporate environment.
“These type of skills give myself and other young adults the opportunity have success in their career field,” he said.
He said that he would recommend anyone in his shoes focus on building relationships, networking with people and learning what they actually do for work.
“That way in the future, when opportunity arises, you’ll know exactly who to call for the job,” he said.