06 February 2023

Uptime Institute has completed its acquisition of Academia Group Limited and all of its global subsidiaries including CNet Training Ltd.

CNet Training is an international award-winning technical education company. CNet Training has been designing and delivering professional network and data centre infrastructure training programs since 1996 and has trained over 83,000 data centre professionals across 45 countries.

“The data centre industry is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. The continued, extraordinary industry expansion requires a growing and diverse workforce, however concerns over the industry’s ability to attract, educate, and retain skilled technical staff persist. This acquisition will help our respective customers thrive in a rapidly changing ecosystem, by giving them access to a range of world class corporate learning and development technical education programs that are backed up by practical experience and specialized domain expertise,” said Martin V McCarthy, CEO, Uptime Institute.

CNet Training dramatically extends the range and depth of Uptime Education offerings and positions Uptime as the learning & development partner of choice around the world. The combined offerings will include solutions valuable for every point in a career for a digital infrastructure professional. This includes entry level staff, even adolescents in apprenticeships, to post graduate degrees in data centre leadership for savvy, long serving professionals.

“We are excited to join the accelerating Uptime team. CNet Training was already growing quickly, but now will have many more opportunities through further geographic expansion, and new service offerings, as a part of Uptime. As we look forward to this next phase, I want to personally thank all our clients, staff, and investors who have supported us over these past 26 + years of delivering unique value and in bringing ongoing innovation to the Digital Infrastructure Education market,” said Andrew Stevens, CEO of CNet Training.

Uptime Institute’s Intelligence team recently completed a market research study indicating the number of staff needed to design, build, and operate data centres will continue to grow globally from about 2.0 million in 2019 to nearly 2.3 million by 2025. A wide range of specialist jobs (230 detailed in Uptime Institute Data Center Career Pathfinder, developed in association Google, Meta & Microsoft) are required by the sector to support its continued expansion. The combination of Uptime Institute and CNet Training will directly address the evolving training needs of all current and future data centre employees as they progress through their careers.