Rack Centre has launched a new training initiative aimed at addressing one of the most persistent constraints facing West Africa’s digital infrastructure sector: the shortage of skilled data center engineers.
The Lagos-based carrier-neutral operator announced the Rack Centre Academy at IoT West Africa on April 29, positioning the program as a structured response to the region’s growing demand for technical capacity as data center deployments accelerate across Nigeria and neighbouring markets.
Developed in partnership with Schneider Electric, International Business Training Centre (IBTC), the Africa Data Centres Association (ADCA), and EPI, the academy is designed to provide internationally recognised certification and hands-on operational training within live mission-critical environments.
The initiative reflects a wider shift across African infrastructure markets, where talent availability is emerging alongside power reliability and financing as a limiting factor for scaling compute capacity.
According to ADCA research, more than 61% of organisations across the sector still depend on fragmented internal training programmes, highlighting the absence of a coordinated regional pipeline for data center engineering skills.
“At Rack Centre, we’ve built an AI-ready data center, but infrastructure is only as strong as the people who manage it,” said Lars Johannisson, Chief Executive Officer of Rack Centre. “The data center industry in West Africa is at an inflection point. We can either wait for the talent gap to widen, or we can act.”
The academy will run as a five-month structured programme combining classroom instruction, certification pathways and practical immersion at Rack Centre’s Lagos facility. Participants will receive training across infrastructure operations, monitoring systems, security protocols and hardware management aligned with global engineering standards.
The programme is fully sponsored, targeting recent graduates in engineering, computer science and related technical disciplines, and is expected to create early-career entry pathways into one of the fastest-growing segments of Africa’s digital infrastructure economy.
Rack Centre’s Director of Operations, Sunday Opadijo, said the initiative is intended to support long-term reliability requirements across mission-critical environments rather than short-term staffing needs.
“To maintain our uptime promise, we need what we call reliable guardians – technicians who understand mission-critical infrastructure,” he said. “The Rack Centre Academy is how we are building that talent pipeline not just for ourselves, but for the entire West African ecosystem.”
The launch comes as enterprise cloud adoption, financial-sector localisation requirements and emerging artificial intelligence workloads begin to increase demand for carrier-neutral hosting environments across Nigeria. While investment in facilities has accelerated in recent years, workforce development has lagged behind infrastructure expansion.
By aligning certification with operators such as Schneider Electric University and EPI, the programme signals a shift toward standardising technical training frameworks across the region’s data centre sector.Applications for the first cohort are now open through Rack Centre’s academy platform https://rack-centre.com/academy/
