Rack Centre to train engineers as Nigeria’s data centre talent shortage grows
Rack Centre, a Lagos-based Tier III carrier and cloud-neutral data centre facility, is launching a structured training programme for university students and engineering graduates to expand Nigeria’s technical workforce. The programme will kick off on Wednesday.
The move comes as demand for data infrastructure grows alongside cloud adoption and AI workloads. While new facilities are being built—bringing the number of operational data centres in Africa to 249 as of February 2026—operators say the supply of engineers needed to manage critical systems, particularly power and cooling, has not kept pace.
“There’s a lot of recycling of the same people across companies,” Adebola Adefarati, Rack Centre’s head of marketing and communications, told TechCabal on Monday. “People move from one data centre or telco to another, and it becomes a closed loop. The industry has to start creating new talent.”
A survey by the Africa Data Centre Association suggests that 67% of data centre operators in Nigeria identify talent retention as a major challenge. In comparison, more than 60% rely on informal, in-house training to keep operations running. Globally, the workforce deficit is even more pronounced, with projections from Uptime Institute intelligence pointing to a need for 2.5 million additional data centre professionals by 2025.
In Africa, the issue is compounded by a mix of limited specialised training, aggressive local hiring, and international poaching. Engineers trained to operate in high-stress environments like Lagos—where unreliable grid power and high ambient temperatures are the norm—are particularly attractive to global employers.
“Once people gain experience running reliable systems in Nigeria, they become prime targets,” Adefarati said. “We’ve seen a number of our own people leave for opportunities abroad.”
Rack Centre’s response is to build a broader pipeline rather than compete for the same limited pool.
Data centres require relatively small teams, but with highly specialised expertise. Much of the infrastructure is automated, so staffing needs are low—typically 30 to 100+ people for a 100MW facility. For a 12MW site like Rack Centre’s, the workforce is even smaller at about 20 full-time staff, including technicians, engineers, and management, meaning the company cannot absorb all the talent it trains and expects graduates to be distributed across the industry.
The programme will train between 15 and 20 engineers in its first cohort, with only a fraction expected to be absorbed internally. The rest will be absorbed by other operators within the data centre ecosystem and telecom operators.
Participants will undergo two certification tracks, including one delivered in partnership with Schneider Electric’s training platform, followed by an advanced course and a one-month internship inside a live facility. The full programme runs for four to five months.
Training costs, estimated at $2,500 per participant, are fully subsidised, reflecting a broader industry consensus that individuals cannot shoulder the financial burden of specialised certification, according to Adefarati.
“The issue is not that people aren’t studying engineering,” he said. “It’s that they’re not trained to work on systems that must run 100% of the time. Data centres are different. You’re dealing with redundant power, precision cooling, and real-time fault detection in a highly sensitive environment.”
That complexity is especially pronounced in Nigeria, where maintaining uptime requires adapting global standards to local realities, like hot environments. Cooling systems, for instance, must operate efficiently in temperatures that can exceed 40°C, while power infrastructure must compensate for an inconsistent grid supply.
Rack Centre’s programme is being developed in collaboration with the Africa Data Centres Association, which is working toward a broader goal of training up to 1,000 data centre professionals over the next two years. The effort aligns with a wider industry push toward a “source-train-place” model, designed to create a continuous pipeline of talent rather than episodic hiring.
The programme also targets structural imbalances within the workforce. Women remain significantly underrepresented in core operational roles, accounting for as little as 5% of technical staff in some facilities. Rack Centre says it aims to ensure that at least one-third of participants in each cohort are female.
“Data centres are often seen as hardware,” Adefarati said. “But their success is fundamentally about people.”
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