The mikeroweWORKS skilled trade campaign here in North Texas is working. We’re only two months in, but as a direct result of this effort, people are exploring opportunities in the trades in record numbers. This is good, because there are a record number of opportunities in the skilled trades to be explored.
This morning in Irving, I stopped by a ribbon-cutting at Wells Fargo’s newest campus, and participated in panel discussion about the role Texas might play in leading a national effort to reinvigorate the skilled trades. On stage 
was Charlie Scharf, (the CEO of Wells Fargo, who is helping fund this current campaign,) and Greg Abbott, (a Governor who actually understand the criticality of closing the skills gap.) I was honored to talk with them, and to all those assembled, about the success we’re having in North Texas, and my desire to expand our efforts throughout the state and beyond. Many thanks to Wells Fargo and Governor Abbott for welcoming me.
In other news, I finally got a tour of a Data Center. This one is in Plano, TX, and built by Aligned. The size and scope are mind boggling. This one isn’t even one of the big ones, but still, 360,000 square feet is not small. I wish I could tell you exactly what goes on inside, or how it all works, but in spite of my excellent tour guides, the details of these modern marvels are still beyond my ability to sum up. Suffice it to say that there are lots of enormous generators, lots of enormous Uninterrupted Power Supplies, and lots of enormous cooling units that would, if turned off, send the interior temperature to 110 in less than five minutes. And of course, somewhere behind the walls of these endless corridors – off limits to civilians like me – is lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and LOTS of data.
At base, Data Centers, (I think), are the engine rooms of the digital world. They’re the places that allow the Internet to answer all your questions a second after you ask, and now, with AI providing more and more of those answers, the need for Data Centers is impossible to overstate. Thousands are going to be built in the very near future, which means hundreds of thousands of jobs for skilled tradespeople, accentuating the pressing need to train a new generation of skilled 
workers. One of my tour guides told me that electricians in Texas are pretty
much designing their own schedules, and making $200K a year, and more.
“The turnover rate is stunning,” he said. “Everybody is poaching from everybody. Companies are desperate and paying more per hour for an experienced electrician than most lawyers can charge. We’ve never seen anything like it.”
In other words, if you’ve ever thought about becoming an electrician, welder, or HVAC technician, this would be a good time to jump in. Especially in Texas.