Top Sustainability Certifications to Advance Your Data Center Career

It's one thing to talk about data center sustainability. It's another to earn a certification proving that you've mastered sustainability concepts and best practices. But as data center operators continue to prioritize sustainability, gaining a certification in this area can be a wise way to advance your data center career.

To that end, we've prepared the following concise guide to data center sustainability certifications. It covers certificates and training programs that focus on the data center industry specifically, as well as more general sustainability certifications.

Why Earn a Data Center Sustainability Certification?

To be sure, you don't strictly need a certificate in data center sustainability to contribute effective to sustainability initiatives inside a data center – and, given that the sustainability certificates for data centers remain a relatively new type of offering, it's a safe bet that a majority of data center staff today who help to design or manage renewable energy sourcing, efficient water use and other sustainability-related efforts don't have formal certifications in this area.

Nonetheless, earning a formal sustainability credential can be valuable from a career perspective. It helps to prove that you actually understand complex sustainability concepts and practices, and that you can put sustainability into practice inside data centers – as opposed to spouting buzzwords without understanding how they translate to everyday operations.

Types of Sustainability Certifications for Data Centers

Before diving into a roundup of the main sustainability certifications available for data center professionals today, we should make clear that there are two main types of certifications related to sustainability in data centers.

The first category includes certifications designed for individuals. These are the certifications we cover below.

The second type of certification, a prime example of which is LEED, focuses on certifying that buildings are designed and managed in sustainable ways. These certifications are valuable for data center operators who want to prove that they've invested effectively in sustainability. But they're not the type of credential you should pursue to advance your career, so we're not covering them in this guide.

5 Major Data Center Sustainability Certifications

Now, let's look at five of the top data center sustainability certifications available today. As we mentioned, some of these credentials were designed for data centers specifically, while others are certifications that demonstrate expertise in sustainability in data centers as well as other contexts.

CDESS

The Certified Data Centre Environmental Sustainability Specialist (CDESS) credential is available from EPI, a data center auditing and training company.

Designed primarily for data center staff who play a hands-on role in the everyday operation of data center facilities, this credential covers practices like how to measure sustainability and calculate carbon emissions.

CDCSP

Alongside CDESS, the other main sustainability credential designed for data centers specifically is Certified Data Center Sustainability Professional (CDCSP).

Compared to CDESS, CDCSP is a bit more high-level and focuses on sustainability from a data center business perspective rather than a practitioner perspective. If you're a data center manager or executive, you might find CDCSP to be the ideal fit.

SEA

Sustainability Excellence Associate (SEA) is one of the most widely recognized general-purpose sustainability credentials for individuals. If you want to demonstrate an understanding of core sustainability concepts that you could apply not just to data centers, but a variety of other industries, SEA offers a good baseline.

SEP

The Sustainability Excellence Professional (SEP) credential, for which SEA is a prerequisite, is a more advanced credential. Consider pursuing it if you want a general-purpose sustainability certificate that truly helps you stand out from the crowd.

LEED Green Associate

Although the LEED rating system is mainly used to certify that buildings are designed sustainably, the LEED Green Associate credential is available for individuals who want to demonstrate that they understand LEED concepts and practices.

This certification focuses mostly on building design, not operations, and it's not specific to data centers. This makes it a good choice for professionals whose main role in data center sustainability is design, but it's less ideal for data center technicians and managers.