She was a custodian at a data center until a coworker noticed her skills. Now Mike Rowe and Meta are training her to be a technician

Two nail-biting months after applying, Brooks heard back: she was in. She boarded her first-ever flight to Indianapolis and dove headfirst into learning about physical servers and networking — with a goal of transitioning into an advanced technician role within the year.

“This opportunity is my direct path to achieving the American dream,” Brooks said.

Brooks is one of the academy’s first success stories, Rowe shared in a recent post on X. But Meta isn’t doing this only out of the kindness of its corporate heart.

“Practically every major industry is desperate to hire more skilled workers,” wrote Rowe and Meta president Dina Powell McCormick in the announcement in early June. “At Meta alone, we anticipate needing thousands more workers as we build infrastructure to empower students, families and small-business owners.”

The trades push

While Rowe is celebrating the success of the Meta training program, he points out that any real solution for the labor gap will require other companies getting involved as well.

“The skills gap will not close with one effort from one entity, but rather, from a series of efforts like this one, led by companies with the most to gain by reinvigorating the trades on a national level,” he wrote on X.

Some companies are already on it. Lowe’s, BlackRock and Google have also put money toward training new tradespeople — to the collective tune of $365 million. They hope to train around 300,000 new workers by 2036. Rowe also shouted out Ford, Carhartt and Home Depot for their efforts here.

The federal government for its part has also put its hat in the ring, releasing a new rule that allows vocational program students to use Pell Grants.

In 2024, McKinsey put out a report on the increasing trades shortage. It found two major problems behind this: an aging workforce and cultural bias against tradesworkers.

The U.S. population is getting older: By 2030, one in five people will be of retirement age, projects the Census Bureau. They also project that, by 2034, older adults will outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history.

As the general population gets older, more and more people age out of the physical jobs that dominate the trades. In order for work to continue sustainably, retired workers need to be replaced by younger workers.

But younger people are being pushed away from the trades as a career. Only 7% of Gen Z parents say they would want their children to pursue a vocational program, per a 2025 report from Jobber. At the same time, 71% of Gen Z say there’s stigma around going to a vocational school.

All of this, along with the trades’ high job churn, means employers are having a tough time hiring enough trades workers. But if U.S. industries can’t find enough skilled workers to keep critical infrastructure and manufacturing running, Rowe says the country could be heading toward a future that describes as “existential-alarm bell bad.”

Driven by data center construction

What’s behind the latest push to hire trades workers? In short: AI data centers.

“The AI economy, like it or not, is upon us, and the infrastructure that’s being proposed to support it will cost upwards of $10 trillion and require hundreds of thousands of skilled workers,” wrote Rowe, who is also CEO of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, in an X post. “Workers that, for the moment anyway, do not exist.”