A 5-week course and a guaranteed job: Meta commits $115 million to solve the skilled-trades shortage stalling its AI buildout

Trade jobs are the future, and Meta knows it. The company is launching an initiative called America’s Workforce Academy to train data center technicians in partnership with commercial real estate giant CBRE, the Associated Builders and Contractors, a construction trade association, and the civil rights organization National Urban League. Meta is committing $115 million this year to provide free training and a guaranteed job upon the program’s completion. The company is covering all the costs for the five-week program, from tuition to housing to a daily training stipend. No prior experience is necessary, and the training is open to everyone from recent grads to people making a career pivot. “America’s Workforce Academy is our commitment to building that workforce with the same ambition and long-term thinking we bring to the technology itself,” said Rachel Peterson, Meta’s vice president of data centers. “America needs hundreds of thousands of skilled tradespeople — electricians, mechanics, fiber technicians and more — and this program creates clear, accessible pathways into those careers.” The initiative comes as Americans debate the increasingly unpredictable value of a four-year college degree and uncertainty over the future of white-collar work. Blue-collar trade jobs in construction, HVAC, and electrical work are in much higher demand than the national average. The academy’s graduates will earn an industry-recognized National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER) credential and an America’s Workforce Certificate. The average salary for a data center technician is $54,031, according to ZipRecruiter. Meta did not respond to Fortune’s questions about how many people the academy plans to train or the salary ranges of the guaranteed positions with contractors building out Meta’s data network. Even though seven in 10 Americans oppose building data centers near where they live, Meta is pushing ahead with its plan to invest $600 billion in U.S. data cent