No degree? No problem. Inside Blackstone’s ambitious plans to internally grow talent for its data centers and other portfolio companies

• Blackstone is investing big in data centers and other AI infrastructure.
• That means getting ahead of the data-center labor shortage with training programs and internships.
• Alhaji Dawon tells how he got a job working alongside college grads before earning his own degree.

Investors around the world are clamoring to invest in data centers, the infrastructural backbone of the promised generative AI revolution. Demand is skyrocketing, putting strain on electrical grids.

There’s also a massive labor shortfall. Data-center staffing requirements are set to rise from 2 million in 2019 to 2.3 million in 2025, according to The Uptime Institute, and data-center workers often need to learn specialized, novel skills.

Earlier this year, Steve Schwarzman set a goal for Blackstone to be the largest investor in AI infrastructure in the world. A spokesperson told BI that the firm’s portfolio of data centers recently stood at $55 billion with a pipeline of $70 billion in additional assets in the works. A key part of Blackstone’s strategy has been Blackstone Infrastructure Partners, Blackstone Property Partners, and BREIT’s $10 billion acquisition of QTS, a data center REIT, in 2021.

At QTS, Blackstone is taking a proactive approach to the talent problem, adding to initiatives that started under the firm’s previous owners. It’s launched an internal Data Center Academy to find and train candidates to fill the specialized technical positions that can be tricky to hire for. QTS’s talent programs have led to 100 new, trained hires, or 8% of the company’s total size.

Blackstone’s initiatives at QTS are part of the firm’s talent-developing Career Pathways program, which was founded by Blackstone’s global head of private equity, Joe Baratta, in 2020.

At the firm’s 2024 Career Pathways Summit earlier this month, Marcus Felder, a vice president in portfolio operations and the head of Career Pathways, said the program has two main aims: “constructively disrupting hiring” within its portfolio companies and creating programs and practices to help those new workers develop and advance.

In other words, Career Pathways seeks to help Blackstone’s portfolio companies solve their talent problems by looking for solutions in places they may not have been looking before and then creating internal programs to develop that talent. Speaking at the September 16 event at Blackstone’s Manhattan headquarters, Felder noted that portfolio companies participating in the program have hired more than 10,500 individuals from underrepresented groups. But it’s not a charity. It’s a business strategy to solve an economic problem.

“We put it inside of our portfolio operations side of the business,” Blackstone’s president and chief operating officer Jon Gray said at the summit. “It’s not a charitable effort. It’s designed to drive talent to companies.”‘

Indeed, private-equity firms have been increasingly turning to their portfolio operations teams to drive a return on investment as high interest rates and other factors make it harder to make money from financial engineering.

Here’s how Blackstone’s Career Pathways program is helping the firm solve its data center talent problem.

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.

“The most important thing I would say about the employees who have joined us is that they are bringing new perspectives and skills, they’re launching new programs, they’re engaging in innumerable ways and just being a great value to our company’s culture,” Kimberly Hines, vice president of belonging and experience at QTS.

A new path

Alhaji Dawon first heard about Year Up while at a soccer game with a friend. Their team was losing, so they started talking about careers. At the time, Dawon was working for a manufacturing company in a warehouse, making little over minimum wage. He was planning to eventually attend college for cybersecurity, but he hadn’t started yet.

Dawon’s friend had recently completed the Year Up program and, at the end of it, had landed an impressive job. Dawon was convinced to apply to the program. He was accepted and then placed at QTS.

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.