When Should Workforce Planning Start?

Most data center projects have a workforce plan. The problem is when it shows up. Too often, staffing enters the conversation once a facility is weeks from commissioning and a general contractor or operator suddenly needs a NOC team, a commissioning crew, or a bench of licensed electricians that does not yet exist. By then, the labor market has already set its terms.

Workforce planning and hiring are not the same thing, and treating them as one activity is part of why they get scheduled so late. Hiring is transactional: post a role, source candidates, onboard them against a known start date. Workforce planning is analytical: understanding what skills a project will need, in what volume, at each phase, and where those skills are likely to be scarce, expensive, or slow to secure. That analysis does not require a single new hire. It requires only that someone ask the question early enough for the answer to matter.

There is no single point on the calendar where every data center project should start planning its workforce, and any framework that claims otherwise is oversimplifying. What holds across projects of every size is the direction of the relationship: the earlier labor availability, skill requirements, and project phasing are evaluated, relative to site selection, design, and construction milestones, the more options a project has when it actually needs to staff a phase.

Why Timing Matters More Than a Single Start Date

Asking "when should workforce planning begin" invites a search for one correct answer. A more useful question is what workforce planning is actually evaluating at each point in a project, because the answer changes the further a project moves from groundbreaking. Early on, the relevant questions are about the labor market itself: what trades and technical skills are locally available, how tight that market already is, and how project timelines interact with it. Later, the questions shift toward execution: who is confirmed, when do they start, and how does a specific crew hand off to the next phase.

Data center capacity is expanding fast enough that this distinction matters more than it used to. Global data center capacity is projected to nearly double from 103 GW in 2025 to 200 GW by 2030, according to JLL, and CBRE tracked 7,481 MW under construction across primary North American markets in the first half of 2026 alone, a 24.8% increase over the prior year. Every one of those projects is drawing from a technical labor pool that is not expanding at the same pace. Projects that treat workforce planning as a pre-construction input, not a construction-phase task, are the ones with the most room to maneuver when that pool tightens further.

Site Selection: Read the Labor Market Before You Commit

Site selection decisions are usually built around a familiar list: power availability and cost, land and zoning, fiber and network connectivity, water for cooling, permitting timelines, and tax incentives. Labor is rarely on that list with the same weight, even though a site selection decision is also, functionally, a decision about which regional labor market a project will depend on for years, through construction and for the life of the facility's operations.

Evaluating the labor market during site selection does not mean recruiting anyone. It means asking a narrower set of questions before a location is finalized: does this market have an established base of electricians, structured cabling technicians, and other trades this project's timeline will need, or would the project be one of the first to draw on it at scale? How does the regional cost of skilled labor compare to other markets under consideration? Are nearby training programs or apprenticeship pipelines producing workers in the disciplines a data center needs? Is this market already host to other large data center or industrial construction projects competing for the same trades on an overlapping timeline?

Those answers do not override site-selection factors like power and connectivity, which remain the primary drivers for good reason. They add a dimension that is otherwise easy to discover only after a location is locked in and a general contractor starts trying to staff the first phase of work. A market that looks efficient on power and land costs but thin on skilled trades is not disqualified by that fact alone, but it is a market where workforce strategy, sourcing further afield, budgeting for training, or building in longer lead times, needs to start earlier than it would in an established data center hub.

Design and Preconstruction: Turn the Schedule Into a Workforce Plan

By the time a project moves into design and preconstruction, the technical scope is taking shape: single-story or multi-story, the number of pods or halls, the electrical and mechanical systems specified, the phasing plan if the facility will be built and commissioned in stages. Every one of those decisions implies a workforce requirement, even before a general contractor is selected or the first trade contract is signed.

This is the phase to translate the project schedule into an early workforce map: which trades and technical disciplines the design will require, in roughly what volume, and at which points in the schedule they will be needed. A design calling for extensive structured cabling and a large low-voltage buildout implies a different labor draw, and a different lead time, than one with a simpler electrical scope. A phased campus implies overlapping demand for the same trades across multiple pods, a different planning problem than a single building built once.

The output of this phase is not a hiring plan. It is a risk map: which roles in the design are likely to be straightforward to staff locally, and which are likely to require broader sourcing, longer lead times, or budget for training and certification. Identifying that risk during design and preconstruction gives a project time to adjust. Identifying it once construction has started means absorbing whatever the labor market offers on short notice.

Construction: Align Workforce Planning With Project Milestones

Construction is where a data center's workforce needs shift the most, and shift the fastest. Shell and core work draws on general trades and electrical and mechanical rough-in similar to any large commercial build. Once the building is enclosed, the project moves into infrastructure fit-out, where structured cabling and low-voltage technicians, rack and pathway installers, and electrical and controls technicians become the critical path. As physical infrastructure comes online, the mix shifts again toward systems integration and testing: deployment technicians, network and security technicians, and test and validation support working alongside the trades finishing fit-out.

None of those phases need the same people, in the same numbers, at the same time, and a workforce plan built during design and preconstruction only holds up if it is actively coordinated against the real construction schedule as that schedule shifts, which it usually does. A project that mapped its trade needs early but does not revisit that map as milestones move is likely to find the same gap it was trying to avoid, just later than expected.

This is also the phase where the broader skilled trades market most directly competes with a specific project's timeline. The construction and extraction occupational group is projected to grow 5.2% from 2024 to 2034, adding roughly 394,100 jobs nationally, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and electricians specifically are projected to grow 9% over 2025-2035, much faster than the average for all occupations, with about 72,700 annual openings projected across that decade. A data center under construction is staffing against that same national demand, not against a labor market that exists solely to serve one project. Coordinating workforce milestones with construction milestones is what keeps a project from discovering a gap only once a trade is already behind schedule.

Commissioning and Startup: Manage the Workforce Transition

Commissioning and startup is the highest-risk transition in the entire lifecycle, because it is where a project moves from being built to being operated, and those two activities call for different people with different expertise. Commissioning teams need to validate that mechanical, electrical, and controls systems perform as designed, often under a compressed schedule with multiple systems being tested in sequence or in parallel. Startup is when the facility begins accepting live load, at which point operations and monitoring staff need to already understand the systems they are responsible for, not be encountering them for the first time.

The workforce risk at this phase is less about volume and more about continuity. When operations and monitoring staff are brought on only after commissioning has wrapped, they inherit systems they did not help validate, and the knowledge of why something was configured a certain way has to be reconstructed from documentation rather than transferred directly from the people who did the work. That reconstruction takes time a facility preparing for live load usually does not have.

Planning for this transition means identifying, well before commissioning starts, which roles need to carry over from construction into operations, whether through direct continuity or a deliberate overlap period, and which roles are genuinely new to the operations phase. Data center technicians, NOC and monitoring analysts, and on-site operations support are typically the roles most affected. Building that overlap into the plan is what keeps a facility from opening with a support team that is qualified on paper but unfamiliar with the specific systems it just inherited.

Operations: Workforce Planning Doesn't End at Launch

It is tempting to treat a successful startup as the finish line for workforce planning, but a data center's staffing needs keep evolving for as long as the facility operates. Ongoing operations require technical and maintenance staff to sustain electrical, mechanical, and controls systems; monitoring and NOC coverage around the clock; and security and access control personnel, all of which need refresh planning as employees are promoted, relocate, or leave.

Operational workforce needs also change with the facility itself. Capacity expansions, whether an additional hall, a new pod, or a power upgrade, effectively restart parts of the construction-to-operations cycle on a smaller scale and often on a tighter timeline because the facility is already live. Equipment refresh cycles, new cooling or power technologies, and evolving compliance or security requirements can all shift the skills a facility's operations team needs over time, even without a physical expansion.

According to AFCOM's State of the Data Center 2026 Executive Summary, 87% of surveyed data center operators report that workforce gaps are affecting operations, up from 85% the year before, and 56% identify data center engineers as the most in-demand near-term role. Treating workforce planning as something that concludes at startup leaves operations teams managing the same kind of reactive staffing pressure that better planning was supposed to prevent earlier in the lifecycle.

Anistar supports data center staffing across the lifecycle, from structured cabling, low-voltage, and electrical and controls technicians during infrastructure and fit-out, to deployment, network, and test and validation support during systems integration, to data center technicians and NOC or monitoring staff for turn-up and ongoing operations. Anistar works with project and operations leaders to map staffing needs to program schedules and handles sourcing, screening, documentation, and payroll behind each placement. Explore Anistar infrastructure staffing, or connect with our team to talk through where your project sits on the lifecycle above.