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Trade jobs are the future, and Meta knows it. The company is launching an initiative called America\u2019s Workforce Academy to train data center technicians in partnership with commercial real estate giant CBRE; Associated Builders and Contractors, a construction trade association; and civil rights organization National Urban League.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meta is committing $115 million this year to provide free training and a guaranteed job upon the program\u2019s completion. The company is covering all the costs for the five-week program, from tuition to housing to a daily training stipend. No prior experience is necessary, and the training is open to everyone from recent grads to people making a career pivot.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAmerica\u2019s Workforce Academy is our commitment to building that workforce with the same ambition and long-term thinking we bring to the technology itself,\u201d said Rachel Peterson, Meta\u2019s vice president of data centers. \u201cAmerica needs hundreds of thousands of skilled tradespeople\u2014electricians, mechanics, fiber technicians, and more\u2014and this program creates clear, accessible pathways into those careers.\u201d<\/p>\n
The initiative comes as Americans debate the increasingly unpredictable value of a four-year college degree and uncertainty over the future of white-collar work. Blue-collar trade jobs in construction, HVAC, and electrical work are in much higher demand than the national average.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The academy\u2019s graduates will earn an industry-recognized National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER) credential and an America\u2019s Workforce Certificate. The average salary for a data center technician is $54,031, according to ZipRecruiter. Meta did not respond to Fortune\u2019<\/em>s <\/em>questions about how many people the academy plans to train or the salary ranges of the guaranteed positions with contractors building out Meta\u2019s data network.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even though seven in 10 Americans oppose building data centers near where they live, Meta is pushing ahead with its plan to invest $600 billion in U.S. data center development by 2028. At the same time, the company has laid off 10% of its workforce, about 8,000 employees, and moved another 7,000 staffers to AI-focused roles as part of a major restructuring.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meta currently operates or is building 27 data centers. The program will be piloted in Baton Rouge, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Houston. Richland Parish in Louisiana is home to the company\u2019s largest data center campus, and thousands of temporary workers have moved to the town to build out the center. A small group of 500 is expected to remain in permanent roles at the 2,250-acre campus. The $27 billion development has received a mixed response from the local community, Fortune<\/em> previously reported. The temporary economic boom has helped local businesses, but residents fear higher rent and negative environmental impacts.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe AI revolution is bringing change but also historic opportunities. Skilled workers electrified rural America one pole at a time. They manned the factories that built the arsenal that won World War II,\u201d Dina Powell McCormick, Meta\u2019s president and vice chairman, said in a statement. \u201cNow a new generation will pour the foundations and lay the fiber that secures American strength in this new age.\u201d<\/p>\n The initiative builds upon the LevelUp fiber technician training program that Meta and CBRE announced in April. Over four weeks, participants will receive free training. The program, which received 35,000 applications for 1,000 openings in the first seven days, is expected to start this summer. The average salary nationwide for a fiber technician is $57,818, according to ZipRecruiter. About 180,000 additional fiber construction and technical workers are needed in the next 10 years to meet the demand for planned federal and state projects, according to the Fiber Broadband Association.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mark Zuckerberg and Meta also pledged $50 million to Sacramento State in January to build state-of-the-art STEM facilities and an AI center, which Gov. Gavin Newsom said will strengthen the region\u2019s tech talent pipeline.<\/p>\n The academy is strongly aligned with President Donald Trump\u2019s America First agenda, which aims to fuel a \u201cblue-collar resurgence.\u201d The administration wants to train more than a million registered apprentices and has invested more than $229 million in grants to support that goal. Its focus is singularly on American workers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the president have been in conversation about the company\u2019s data center build-out. In January, Trump shared at the World Economic Forum meeting that Zuckerberg had showed him a map of a data center campus, potentially Richland Parish, overlaid on a map of Manhattan.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI said, \u2018You\u2019ve got to be kidding.\u2019 It was miles long, miles wide, and very high. It literally covered most of the island,\u201d Trump said.\u00a0<\/p>\n The CEO has maintained a close relationship with Trump as a member of the President\u2019s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He also recently lobbied the president to postpone an executive order on AI regulation. Weeks later, Trump signed a version of the order with weaker government oversight. Zuckerberg has defended his<\/span> relationship with Trump, saying that it is \u201cfundamental\u201d for Meta to have a good relationship with the U.S. government.\u00a0<\/p>\n The company has also argued that training Americans in skilled trades is essential to competing with China\u2019s AI capacity.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf the country, if America doesn\u2019t come together and ensure that we frankly treat these workers as the American heroes that they are, without them, we can\u2019t compete with China,\u201d Powell McCormick said on Fox News on Tuesday. Meta did not say in the release whether the program is limited to American citizens but has highlighted the role of \u201cAmerican workers.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The company is far from the only one investing in trade jobs. BlackRock, the world\u2019s largest asset manager, is investing $100 million to train 50,000 plumbers, electricians, and HVAC technicians over the next five years.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAmerica needs an estimated $10 trillion in infrastructure investment by 2033 to modernize aging systems and build new energy, digital, and AI infrastructure,\u201d CEO Larry Fink said in March. \u201cCapital alone is not enough\u2014people are central to building our nation\u2019s future.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Meta #tackling #bluecollar #worker #shortage #investing #million #data #center #trade #jobs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Trade jobs are the future, and Meta knows it. The company is launching an initiative called America\u2019s Workforce Academy to train data center technicians in partnership with commercial real estate… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9116,4905,343,1037,665,40,22,430,362,400,573,3259,9115,220,7572,3088,891],"class_list":["post-6701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-bluecollar","tag-center","tag-data","tag-data-centers","tag-donald-trump","tag-investing","tag-investment","tag-jobs","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-meta","tag-million","tag-shortage","tag-tackling","tag-trade","tag-training","tag-united-states","tag-worker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Aligned with the America First agenda<\/strong><\/h2>\n