The tech job paying six figures, no college degree required

The 24-year-old works the night shift at a giant, mostly windowless data center in Ashburn, Va., part of a fast-growing legion of workers who keep the nation’s internet running. From 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., she monitors screens that track the temperature and humidity of halls storing thousands of servers.

If a server becomes at risk of overheating, alarms ring on her phone and flash on screen. When that happens, her job is to fix the problem. Left alone, such glitches can keep countless users from logging onto their bank accounts or put their email service on the fritz.

“I don’t want to say you have a sense of fear, but you do have a sense of, OK, you can’t panic," says Martinez Castellanos, who also does checks on foot, clocking 10,000 steps a night.

Demand for data-center technicians like Martinez Castellanos is booming, as companies such as Microsoft and Google pour billions into data centers to power everything from AI chatbots to the trillions of photos and emails stored in the cloud. They embody the rise of a class of careers that defy traditional blue- and white-collar distinctions: They are deeply tech-infused, often requiring fluency with programming and computerized systems, plus manual dexterity.

This growing job category can also make good money. Pay for data technicians—whose tasks range from maintaining and repairing servers to operating heating and cooling systems—jumped by 43% in the past three years and stands at a median $75,100, according to certification and training provider CompTIA. Those with more years of experience can earn six figures.

Since January 2020, job ads seeking such workers have risen 18%, while overall tech job postings have fallen by more than half.

Other types of these in-demand occupations also call for high levels of technical know-how, says Brad Hershbein, senior economist at the Upjohn Institute. Becoming a wind-turbine service technician—the nation’s fastest-growing occupation, according to the Labor Department—requires training in everything from hydraulics to electronics. Likewise in manufacturing, today’s lathes are controlled by programming, not by hand.

“The days of being able to join a factory floor right out of high school in overalls on an assembly line, like a Diego Rivera painting—that hasn’t been the reality for a long time now," he says.

$90,000 a year and extra-long weekends

Before starting, Martinez Castellanos attended the Data Center Operations program at Northern Virginia Community College, or NOVA. It offers a one-year certification and two-year degree covering topics from fiber-optic technology to power transmission. She was then hired at $29 an hour at Aligned Data Centers, which leases data-center space to businesses around the country.

Two years later, she earns $43 an hour there, around $90,000 a year, working 12-hour shifts three days a week and every other Wednesday. She uses her off days to paint, play guitar or explore waterfall trails in Northern Virginia.

“It’s pretty awesome," she says of her extra-long weekends, a schedule common in the industry.

The area she lives in is known as Data Center Alley, and it processes around 70% of the world’s internet traffic. Employers are eager to hire, says Chad Knights, a vice president at NOVA, and many snap up students before they have completed their studies.

On tech-jobs marketplace Dice, 8% of the site’s job ads are for data technicians, says Art Zeile, CEO of Dice’s parent, DHI Group. Many centers, he says, are in less-populated areas with cheap electricity and few natural disasters. They employ half a million people across the country, including custodial workers, security and other staff, as well as technicians, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis for the Data Center Coalition, a trade group.

“The data-center industry is growing gangbusters," says Chris Kimm, a senior vice president at data-center operator Equinix.

Equinix pays an average of $30 an hour as a starting wage, with senior technicians making six figures. While certifications or associate degrees are helpful, Equinix also trains workers with just a high-school diploma.

“Sometimes you’re up and down a ladder a lot of the day," he says. “Can you maintain focus and do high-quality work with your hands over a shift?"

After being hired at Google as a data technician in South Carolina’s Berkeley County, Damian Diaz, age 37, says his on-the-job training took a year. “It was like drinking out of a fire hose," says Diaz, who immigrated from Cuba nearly two decades ago and worked stints building fences and at an ice-cream factory before landing his current role.

After four years at Google, he makes $112,000 a year, plus bonuses and equity, and is using the extra income to help bring his parents from Cuba to the U.S.

Other workers transition into the field from traditional IT work or the skilled trades, or they come fresh from high school, says Michael Butts, CEO of staffing company Burtch Works. Data-center careers offer an unusual proposition, he says: low barriers to entry and generous paychecks, often in low-cost areas, and plenty of demand and promotion potential.

AI-powered demand

Nick Park, age 45, began work as a data technician after dropping out of college in the 1990s, when the data-center industry was in its infancy. He now manages several data centers for Uber Technologies, earning a base salary of around $175,000, and bonuses and stock that roughly double his compensation.

“Data-center technicians are the unsung heroes," says Park, who lives in Phoenix. “We do our job well, so [servers] typically don’t go down, but when they do, it’s pretty catastrophic." Though he works mostly remotely, he’s responsible for going on-site and helping fix issues, even if it takes days. “I’ve been on call since 1999," he says.

AI’s growth might be powering the explosion of data centers, but those who work in them are at little risk of being replaced by it, says Joe Minarik, chief operating officer at data-center operator DataBank: “If a server goes down in a rack, I need a body to physically go see what went wrong. Did a breaker flip? Did a server catch on fire?"

“We still need humans," he says.

That is a big reason John Clark is considering staying on as a technician at a Microsoft data center near his Clarksville, Va., home. The 20-year-old recently took the job after his college plans fell through. He had once thought of becoming a programmer, but the drought in white-collar hiring has made him think twice.

Though the data-center environment took getting used to—he wears noise-canceling headphones and listens to rap to drown out the drone of fans that cool the center’s servers—Clark says he likes problem-solving on the job.

“There’s a lot of job security here," he says.

Write to Te-Ping Chen at Te-ping.Chen@wsj.com