Why Workforce Planning Can't Wait Until Construction Starts

North American data center construction has a scale problem and a speed problem at the same time. JLL now tracks 35 GW of capacity under construction, and vacancy for finished space has sat at a record-low 1% for two straight years. Every one of those projects needs cabling crews, integration technicians, and operations staff before it can go live.

Most project plans still treat workforce as a construction-phase problem — something the general contractor or the operator figures out once trades are needed on-site. That works when labor is easy to find. It does not work in a market where contractors doing data center work already carry longer backlogs than the rest of the industry, and where the broader construction sector needs 349,000 net new workers in 2026 alone.

The Timing Problem: Why Workforce Planning Has to Start Before Construction

Construction and delivery timelines for data centers have moved. CBRE's 2026 outlook notes that the traditional 12- to 18-month delivery window for sub-50-MW facilities is no longer representative of the market, and that large AI campuses now run on multi-year construction schedules. Interconnection alone can add 24 to 48 months when utility upgrades are required.

Power and site work get planned against those timelines from day one. Workforce too often does not. A staffing plan that starts once a phase is already underway is, by definition, starting after the point where the most experienced technicians could have been secured.

The data center sector is not staffing in isolation. It draws from the same skilled trades pool as every other construction project, at a moment when the industry needs to attract 349,000 net new workers in 2026. Waiting to plan staffing until a role is urgent means competing for the same shrinking bench everyone else is also sourcing late for.

Treating workforce planning as a project-planning input — reviewed alongside budget, schedule, and design — rather than a construction-phase task is what keeps a project from finding this out the hard way.

The Lifecycle: How Staffing Needs Shift Across the Data Center Lifecycle

A data center project does not need the same people from groundbreaking to go-live. The mix shifts at every phase, and each shift carries its own lead time.

Shell and core construction calls for the general trades and electrical and mechanical rough-in that any large commercial build needs. Once the building is enclosed, the project moves into infrastructure and fit-out, where structured cabling and low-voltage technicians, fiber splicers, rack and pathway installers, and electrical and controls technicians become the critical path. Cabling and low-voltage work is labor-intensive and easy to under-resource, since it runs in dense pathways and rack spaces where workmanship and labeling standards carry directly into commissioning.

As physical infrastructure comes online, the project shifts into systems integration and testing: deployment technicians racking and stacking IT hardware, network and security technicians handling connectivity and configuration, and test and validation support working under the direction of commissioning teams.

Commissioning and turn-up is the highest-risk transition in the lifecycle, because it is where a project moves from construction mode to live operations. Data center technicians, NOC and monitoring analysts, and on-site support staff need to already be in place — not hired after commissioning wraps — so that knowledge transfer from the build team actually happens instead of being reconstructed from documentation after the fact.

The Labor Market: Competing for Skilled Technical Labor in a Tight Market

Data center projects are not staffing against a stable labor pool. They are staffing against a construction sector that needs 349,000 net new workers in 2026, and against each other: roughly 1 in 6 ABC member contractors now hold data center contracts — the highest share on record — and those contractors carry a 9.9-month project backlog versus 8.3 months for contractors without data center work.

That competition is also spreading geographically. JLL's year-end 2025 report found that 64% of the North American construction pipeline now sits outside the traditional hub markets, as capacity growth pushes into more than 40 frontier markets. Many of those markets do not have the deep bench of experienced structured cabling, low-voltage, and commissioning technicians that hub markets have built up over a decade of data center construction.

The result: technical trades specific to data center work — not general construction labor — are the tightest part of the labor pool, and they are getting tighter in exactly the markets where new capacity is being built.

The Cost of Reacting: Why Reactive Recruiting Creates Schedule Risk

Reactive recruiting means sourcing a role once it is already needed on-site, rather than planning for it in advance. In a labor market with the backlog and shortage numbers above, that timing has a direct cost.

CBRE's 2026 outlook and JLL's year-end 2025 report both point to interconnection and grid-connection timelines that now average four years or longer in many markets. When the infrastructure side of a project is planned on a multi-year clock, but staffing decisions are made in the weeks before a phase starts, workforce becomes the variable most likely to slip.

Contractors already carrying a 9.9-month backlog on data center work have little slack left to absorb a late hiring scramble without it showing up in the schedule. A gap in cabling crews during fit-out, or a late start on NOC hiring before turn-up, does not stay contained to that phase — it pushes into the phase after it, because commissioning cannot start until fit-out is verified, and operations cannot take over until commissioning is complete.

This is the mechanism behind most of the handoff friction owners and GCs describe on data center projects: not a single dramatic shortage, but a staffing decision made a phase later than the infrastructure timeline required.

The Fix: Building Workforce Milestones Into the Project Plan

The fix is procedural, not exotic. Workforce milestones belong on the same schedule as design, permitting, and construction milestones, mapped to the phases above:

• Identify which roles are needed for each phase, and in what volume, during design and pre-construction — not once a phase begins.
• Plan for overlap between phases, so some staff carry knowledge from construction into turn-up and early operations instead of a clean handoff with no continuity.
• Build in lead time for the technical trades — structured cabling, low-voltage, commissioning support — that are hardest to source on short notice.
• Engage a specialized staffing partner early enough to align staffing needs with your project phases and schedule, rather than after a gap has already opened.

That last point is where Anistar's role fits. Anistar supplies technical workforce across the data center lifecycle: structured cabling and low-voltage technicians, rack and pathway installers, and electrical and controls technicians for infrastructure and fit-out; deployment, network, and security technicians and test and validation support for systems integration and testing; and data center technicians and NOC or monitoring staff to bridge into turn-up and early operations. Anistar works with project and operations leaders to align that staffing with program schedules and milestones, and handles the sourcing, screening, documentation, and payroll administration behind it, so internal teams stay focused on delivery instead of recruiting logistics. Explore Anistar infrastructure staffing, or connect with our team to map workforce milestones against your project schedule.