The data center industry is on track to spend more than $2 trillion on infrastructure over the next decade. AI, cloud computing, and hyperscale expansion are driving demand at a pace with no modern precedent. Yet one question is not being asked loudly enough: who is going to build it, maintain it, and keep it running?
I bring decades of experience across field services and technology. I have watched the workforce evolve in ways most executives have not stopped to study. Four decades ago, the field services workforce grew in step with industry. Technicians had clear career paths. Apprenticeships thrived. Skilled trades were seen as honorable, well-paying work.
In the 1970’s, careers in the trades were still strongly viewed, but public opinion was beginning to shift toward the concept of trades as a secondary career path for people that were not suited for higher education. Through the 1980s, the field services workforce expanded steadily alongside manufacturing and industrial growth. HVAC technicians, electricians, plumbers, and industrial machinery mechanics all saw reliable demand and improving wages. By the early 1990s, however, a cultural narrative started to take hold: a four-year college degree was the only credible path to a good career. Parents began steering their children toward campuses and away from trade schools.
That message hardened through the late 1990s and into the 2000s. The pipeline of young people entering skilled trades slowed to a trickle, even as demand for those skills increased. The 2008-2011 Recession compounded the problem: hundreds of thousands of construction and field service workers left the industry, and many never came back.
A curriculum decision made in school boards across America deepened the problem in ways we are still measuring. From 1982 to 2013, the number of Career and Technical Education credits earned by high school students fell by more than 26%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Shop classes were cut to make room for standardized test preparation. Vocational programs were defunded in favor of college readiness tracks. The message sent to an entire generation of students was clear: working with your hands was not a respectable career path. As Mike Rowe, an American television host and narrator who has testified before Congress on this issue, has said, when we took shop class out of high school, we told an entire generation of students that a whole category of jobs was simply not desirable. It should surprise no one that those are the very jobs going unfilled today.
Think about what it takes to manufacture and maintain a new piece of automation technology, or to bring a data center online. You are sequencing licensed electricians, commercial plumbers, HVAC technicians, low-voltage specialists, commissioning engineers, and IT infrastructure teams, all of whom have to arrive in a specific order, complete their scope within a tight window, and hand off cleanly to the next trade. When that sequence falls apart, and it falls apart more often than anyone likes to admit, the financial damage is significant. Research from Autodesk and FMI found that 35 percent of construction professionals’ time is spent on non-productive activities, including waiting, conflict resolution, and rework. [1] A separate industry analysis put idle time alone closer to 40 percent. [2] The McKinsey Global Institute estimated that lagging construction productivity costs the global economy $1.6 trillion every year. [3]
Occupation | 1985 | 1995 | 2005 | 2015 | 2025 (Est.) |
HVAC Mechanics & Installers | 155 $18,400* | 215 $27,300* | 278 $37,200 | 330 $46,590 | 383+ $57,300** |
Plumbers, Pipefitters & Steamfitters | 320 $24,600* | 390 $35,200* | 506 $44,090 | 438 $51,450 | 412+ $62,350** |
Electricians | 490 $27,500* | 575 $37,900* | 685 $46,420 | 652 $51,880 | 819+ $62,350** |
Industrial Machinery Mechanics | 210 $25,100* | 265 ~$32,800* | 301 $40,660 | 363 $49,430 | 432+ $61,420** |
Medical Equipment Repairers | 32 $22,000* | 44 $31,600* | 62 $40,590 | 81 $48,820 | 106+ $61,930** |
Computer/Network Support Specialists | N/A N/A | 275 $34,200* | 536 $40,430 | 685 $53,470 | 953+ $80,100** |
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS). Pre-1997 figures (*) estimated from BLS Current Employment Statistics and Census Current Population Survey. 2025 figures (**) based on May 2024 OEWS release, used as best available 2025 proxy. Employment figures in thousands. N/A indicates occupation not tracked as a distinct BLS category in that period.
When we took shop class out of high school, we told an entire generation of students that a whole category of jobs was simply not desirable.
The financial argument against the trades was always overstated, and the data is beginning to correct the record. A journeyman electrician today earns a median of $62,350 per year with zero student loan debt, after four to five years of paid on-the-job training. A four-year college graduate enters the workforce at a median starting salary of roughly $59,384 while carrying an average of $39,000 in federal student loan debt. The trades have always offered a faster, more direct path to financial independence. We simply stopped telling that story in our schools. Today, only 5% of parents of high school students anticipate their child will pursue a career in the skilled trades. That number reflects decades of curriculum decisions, and it has to change. The good news is that there are signs of a shift. The share of teenagers seriously considering vocational or trade school has more than doubled, from 12% in 2018 to 30% in 2024, according to a recent JLL workforce study. That momentum is real, and it needs investment from both the public and private sector to scale.
By the 2010s, the field services industry was growing again, but the workforce was aging. The same technicians who built their careers in the 1980s and 1990s were now nearing retirement, and replacements were not arriving fast enough. Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects roughly 81,000 electrician openings per year through 2034, driven not by growth but by replacement as experienced workers retire. HVAC and plumbing face similar replacement pressures. The numbers in the table below tell that story plainly.
That investment is starting to show up in concrete ways. For example, in February, the U.S. Department of Labor announced the availability of approximately $81 million in RESTART grants to help people reentering their communities after incarceration train for and secure jobs in skilled trades and other high-demand industries, with priority for Registered Apprenticeship partnerships and certain critical sectors like shipbuilding. In March, The Home Depot Foundation launched a nationwide “Shop Class” revival with an initial $1 million investment in 2026 Path to Pro Education Grants, up to $10,000 per eligible school or nonprofit, to modernize training spaces and equipment. This is part of the Home Depot Foundation’s $50M initiative to help fill the construction skills labor gap. In April, the Lowe’s Foundation expanded its commitment to $250 million over the next decade to help train and develop 250,000 tradespeople by 2035 through its Gable Grants program.
The workforce math for the next five years is stark. According to Deloitte and the National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER), 41% of the construction workforce will retire by 2031. That is not a projection about some distant future. That is the next five years. JLL estimates that by 2030, 2.1 million skilled trades jobs could go unfilled in the United States, with potential economic losses reaching $1 trillion annually. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that over 50% of workers in skilled trades will be eligible for retirement within the next decade. The average age of a plumber in this country is now over 50. Nearly 39% of facilities managers are above age 55. For every five skilled tradespeople leaving the workforce, only about two are entering it to take their place.
What makes this particularly urgent is what leaves with those retiring workers. It is not just headcount. It is institutional knowledge accumulated over 20 and 30-year careers. The NCCER estimates it takes roughly 11 years to train a worker to the same skill level as those now exiting the field. The industry is losing experience faster than it can rebuild it. This is why the HVAC industry alone currently has 110,000 unfilled technician positions, representing 38% of what the sector needs to meet existing demand. It is why Google has stated publicly that a shortage of electricians may constrain America’s ability to build the AI infrastructure it is betting its economic future on. The retirement wave is not coming. It is here.
Today, some OEM companies that most need experienced technicians are doing the opposite of what the market demands. They are laying off those workers to reduce short-term operating costs. I understand the financial pressure. But this is a decision that trades long-term capability for short-term savings. When a technician with 20 years of product knowledge walks out the door, that knowledge does not walk back in. The companies racing to build the next generation of AI and data center infrastructure cannot afford to win the cost battle and lose the capability war.
The Uptime Institute found that 53% of data center operators now report difficulty finding qualified workers, up from 38% just a few years ago. The Associated Builders and Contractors estimates that nearly half a million new workers will be needed in construction alone in 2027. Nearly a third of the current electrical workforce is approaching retirement age. Every year, 20,000 electricians leave the field.
I know this not as someone reading about the workforce from a distance, but as someone who has spent many years building businesses alongside these workers. I have watched field engineers take apart complex technologies, recalibrate them, and identify ways to optimize them for maximum uptime. I have seen those same people address equipment failures that would have shut a customer down for days and have the system back online before anyone on the executive team finished drafting their incident report. I have worked with technicians who could diagnose a problem visually before any diagnostic tool confirmed it. I have seen IT field service engineers carry 20 years of product knowledge into a customer environment they had never set foot in, assess a critical failure in minutes, and execute a fix that no service manual had a complete answer for.
What I know about skilled trades and IT field service workers, I did not learn from a workforce study. I learned it from working next to them, from watching what they do under pressure, and from seeing firsthand how much capability many industries have consistently undervalued. These are people who solve real problems in the real world, who bring a depth of knowledge that took decades to build, and who take genuine pride in work that is too often invisible to the people it serves. The talent is there. The work ethic is there. What we need now is an industry structure built to recognize, develop, retain and grow the skilled workforce of the future.
Experienced workers nearing the traditional retirement age are not done contributing. They are done with rigid schedules, mandatory overtime, and one-size-fits-all employment. Give them work that matches their availability and respects their expertise, and they will stay productive longer than any employer expects. The trick will be harnessing the institutional knowledge these workers have garnered over decades, before the sunset of their careers.
Veterans transitioning out of military service arrive with technical training, discipline, and the ability to perform under pressure. That is exactly what field services demands. Many have maintained complex systems in demanding environments their entire careers. The transition to civilian field work is a natural one, but it requires an employer with the infrastructure to credential, train, and deploy them quickly.
Younger workers entering the workforce today are not looking for a 40-year career in a single job with a single employer. They want credentials that travel with them, schedules they can control, and a path to earning more as they grow. They also want to know their career is built on solid ground. The trades offer exactly that. No algorithm replaces an electrician running conduit through a data center. No software update services a liquid cooling system. No AI model commissions a power distribution unit or repairs a medical imaging device on site. Skilled trades are, by their very nature, the work that artificial intelligence cannot do. Every server farm being built to run AI requires human hands to wire it, cool it, and maintain it. The workforce powering the AI economy is not a software engineer sitting at a desk. It is a trained field technician standing on a job site. That is a message worth bringing back into every high school in this country, and it is one that every CEO in this industry has a responsibility to amplify.
Skilled trades are, by their very nature, the work that artificial intelligence cannot do.
At Source Support Services, we built our Unified Services Platform to solve this exact problem. Through Source Techworks, we recruit, credential, background check, and train a global network of field engineers and trade professionals. Our Source Academy provides ongoing training and certifications, so workers grow in their craft rather than plateau. Our platform connects the right technician, qualified and prepared, to the right opportunity, at the right time and place.
We do not force workers into rigid employment structures. We give them options. And we give OEM customers the confidence that every technician dispatched through our platform meets their standards and supports their brand promise. This is not just good workforce strategy. It is a competitive advantage for every organization in our ecosystem.
If you are an HVAC technician, electrician, plumber, industrial technician, or field service professional who is ready to work on your terms, I want to connect.
The demand for what you know has never been higher. The data center buildout, the expansion of medical technology, and the growth of industrial automation and robotics all need people with your skills, your experience, and your dedication.
The Source Support Services Unified Services Platform is ready to connect your capabilities to those opportunities, with training, credentials, and a flexible model designed around how you want to work. Visit www.sourcesupport.com to learn more and apply to join our network
If you are an HVAC technician, electrician, plumber, industrial technician, or field service professional who is ready to work on your terms, I want to connect. sourcesupport.com | Connect with TRG@sourcesupport.com on LinkedIn |
CEO, Source Support Services
