Data Centers key to offering best and brightest of Region top-paying jobs
As a professor in the School of Information Technology at Ivy Tech, I have the chance to work with arguably our most valuable asset here in The Region: our young people.
My students are hard-working, intelligent and hungry for opportunities to work on the technologies that will power our future. Increasingly, they are choosing to pursue career pathways in high-wage, high-demand specialties like cybersecurity, cloud technologies and network infrastructure.
After completing her Associate of Applied Science in cybersecurity, one of my students was hired by Amazon Web Services to work at the data center in New Carlisle. After less than a year in her role as an infrastructure delivery manager at the data center, she is earning an annual salary nearly reaching six figures.
Hers is not the only success story, but it speaks to a larger question that we in Northwest Indiana should consider: What can we do to retain a tech workforce that wants to keep calling Northwest Indiana home?
From my vantage point, investment from data center developers presents a clear answer. We want our brightest, most skilled information technology students to have the option of getting a good job right here in Indiana — and data centers are ready and willing to employ them.
Through partnerships like the one AWS has established with our Ivy Tech campus in South Bend, tech companies recognize an opportunity to build out our local workforce and create quality jobs for our communities. Ivy Tech offers several apprenticeship and dual credit programs already. Adding programs that provide hands-on experience at a working data center will only enhance students’ opportunities for learning and future employment.
These benefits are not limited to higher education. Under a tax agreement announced in March of this year, Microsoft will forgo property tax exemptions for its La Porte County data center projects. Not only will Microsoft pay their tax bill in full, but a significant portion of the tax revenue paid to the City of La Porte will be funneled into the La Porte Community School Corporation.
Celebrated by Mayor Tom Dermody and Superintendent Sandra Wood, this transformational support has the potential to fund new STEM curriculum, create hands-on learning opportunities, and open doors to the tech sector for young learners. More broadly, these agreements show what’s possible when data center developers meet community leaders at the table to structure honest, transparent agreements.
These partnerships, both at the K-12 and higher education level, are not purely anecdotal — they create measurable regional and national impact. One national study found that every direct job in the data center industry — everything from facility managers, engineers, electricians, pipefitters and maintenance staff — creates more than seven jobs on average in related industries like IT, science and computer engineering. These fields of the future will employ today’s students. We ought to anchor these jobs right here in Northwest Indiana.
As technology companies continue to show interest in building data centers, it’s natural to be skeptical and have questions about environmental impact and how communities will actually benefit. We should do our homework. We should ask questions. We should weigh the facts.
Most importantly, we must recognize that data centers have unique potential to be a force for good in our community. There are many reasons to choose to live in a place and call it home. But the one thing that will keep our best and brightest here is the chance to work in a dynamic, high-wage field.
It is up to us to continue creating new opportunities for employment and give our young people another reason to keep choosing Northwest Indiana for decades to come. We can’t do that without data centers.
