One of the biggest challenges facing the digital infrastructure industry is obtaining the talent we need to meet society’s demands.  Infrastructure Masons and our Partners are doing something about it!

Earlier this week I attended DCD>Webscale in San Francisco.  One of the common worries was the talent gap – where are we going to get the people to continue to meet society’s insatiable demand for digital infrastructure?  We can continue to poach employees off each other, or we can work together to solve the problem for all of us.  iMasons sees and is pursuing a couple at least partial solutions, including organizing data center tours for high-school and college students to increase public awareness of our industry and the jobs there, and launching IM Women to promote ways to attract, develop and retain women in our industry.

Today iMasons is announcing one more initiative designed to increase the flow of talent into our industry – the iMasons Scholarship Program.  Through our Education Committee we have identified 11 institutions in the U.S. and Europe that offer 28 high-quality training and education to prepare students to enter and advance in our industry, and we are partnering with those schools and training providers to offer scholarships to their students.

“iMasons provides scholarships to leading digital infrastructure-specific training and education programs in the U.S. and Europe. Click here for more information and to apply.” –Click to tweet

Our goal is to create a virtuous cycle, incentivizing students to come toward our industry, connecting them with career mentors from the iMasons community, giving iMasons partners first crack at the graduates, incentivizing schools and training providers to develop more digital infrastructure-specific training, and supporting those partner schools to provide better and more of the training our industry needs.

The scholarship-eligible programs include short-course certificate programs offered by CNet Training in locations all over the world, on-line professional certificates offered worldwide by Marist College, AAS degrees offered by community colleges in Washington State, North Carolina, and northern Virginia, B.S. minor and post-B.S. certificate programs at University of Tennessee and Colorado School of Mines, and Masters-level programs offered by Southern Methodist University, Anglia-Ruskin in the UK (delivered on-line wordwide), and Lulea Technical University in Sweden.  These programs are designed to train people from high-school graduates and military veterans entering our industry as “smart hands”, to experienced managers wanting to broaden and sharpen their skills to prepare them for the C-Suite.

In order to deliver this program at the scale needed to make a difference, iMasons has partnered with a leading global scholarship management program.  We’ve been very fortunate to gain the financial support of a few individuals and partner companies who share our vision, and we welcome additional contributions to the iMasons Scholarship Fund.  Together we can make a difference!