Educators tapped circuit boards, bent metal conduit for fiber-optic cables and learned what powers and cools racks of servers.
At Luzerne County Community College in Nanticoke, officials from Amazon Web Services hosted what they billed as an Information Infrastructure Workshop on Wednesday.
College president John Yudichak said they hoped to answer a central question.
"How do we build out the 21st century skilled workforce that we're going to need to build out the digital infrastructure?” Yudichak said. "We want to make sure that we're giving the students and giving the residents in Northeastern Pennsylvania a chance to be a part of this wonderful economic boom that's happening across Pennsylvania."
In June, Amazon Web Services officials joined Gov. Josh Shapiro in Columbia County o announce plans to invest at least $20 billion to open data centers in Luzerne and Bucks counties and other sites across Pennsylvania. The investment will help expand Amazon Web’s cloud computing and artificial-intelligence capabilities worldwide. The company is building a data center near the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, a nuclear power plant in neighboring Salem Twp. in Luzerne County.
Wednesday’s workshop brought together educators, workforce leaders and industry partners for a day of hands-on activities, discussions and networking.
"It's much more than building a data center, it's really about building out the digital infrastructure, the cloud computing infrastructure that's going to fuel the American economy, create jobs here in Pennsylvania. It's exciting for Luzerne County Community College to be at the lead of this,” Yudichak said.
Amazon Web officials set up trailers in a parking lot. One trailer demonstrated the monitoring of power to a rack of servers. Another showed the cooling of servers.
Actual data centers house rows and rows of servers that store data for cloud computing and artificial intelligence. At least 15 data center campuses are proposed for Northeast Pennsylvania, according to padatacenterproposals.com.
Construction produces many building trades jobs. Once a center is operational, jobs become more remote with most hands-on jobs centered on maintenance and security.
Nick Lee-Romagnolo works in workforce and economic development with Amazon. He said the company hosted the workshop to teach educators about the job opportunites.
"What are the competencies I need to be able to get these jobs if I'm already in some of these industries? How should I be up-skilled so I can improve my career,” Lee-Romagnolo said.
Yudichak hopes educators take the information back to their schools to guide students into family-sustaining jobs in the new digital infrastructure economy.
“I want the contractors to say we have a partner in Luzerne County Community College, that's where we're going to get our workforce from," he said. “And we want AWS to understand that Pennsylvania community colleges are going to be their best partner in terms of developing the workforce for the 21st century.”
