Talent Talks: Sophie Parker
Introducing Talent Talks, the podcast where we dive into all things talent in the real estate, construction, and infrastructure world. From the boardroom to the building site, we’ll uncover the stories, insights, and people shaping our industry today. We shine a spotlight on data centres, one of real estate's fastest-growing and most in-demand sectors.
In this episode, Sarah Davenport, Managing Director at Capstone, and Oli Coote, Data Centre and Real Estate Sector Lead, speak to Sophie Parker, Head of Talent at Pure Data Centres Group. Sophie shares her non-linear career journey, from starting on the Boots retail graduate management scheme to managing talent in high-growth tech environments. She discusses her accidental transition into learning and development, her perspective on talent management in the data centre sector, and her passionate advocacy for increasing underrepresented groups in the industry.
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Sarah Davenport
Welcome. Today, Oli and I are delighted to be joined by Sophie Parker, Head of Talent at Pure Data Centres Group. Over the past few years, Sophie has not just scaled a talent function; she's earned recognition for doing it. She was recently named a 2025 We Are the City Rising Star for her standout work in people leadership, as well as previously being featured in the iMasons 100 award, which honours the top 100 individuals pushing innovation, inclusion, and excellence in the digital infrastructure space.
So, in this episode, we'll dig into Sophie's journey from retail through to managing talent in high-growth tech environments. And we'll explore talent challenges, opportunities, what's keeping her up at night, as well as finding out who's influenced her career and leadership approach over the years. Sophie, thank you for joining us and welcome to Capstone Talent Talks.
Sophie Parker
Thank you so much for having me.
Sarah Davenport
Let's start with the beginning of your professional career. So, you start, am I right in thinking that the Boots management room was your way in?
Sophie Parker
My first proper job. I did the retail graduate management scheme with Boots, which was a real baptism of fire. I was straight into one of the flagship stores in Merseyside. There were 300 staff, and it was Christmas, and it was brilliant. It was brilliant, but it was a real, real baptism of fire.
Sarah Davenport
The initial test, throwing you into a graduate role during the Christmas season in retail.
Sophie Parker
Yes, it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot there. It was never something I thought I would do forever. It's something that I thought would give me a great set of core skills in terms of understanding big organisations and working with other people.
What really became the nugget that I wasn't expecting was learning that as part of Boots, you move around to a lot of stores. It's one of the ways that they help keep the ideas fresh and keep you learning. So, I'd been in quite a lot of different sizes of stores and different locations. What I found from that was that the success of the store was based on how well the team was looked after.
I wasn't expecting to see that. But the difference, in terms of the feel of the store that I went into and took over, really shone a light for me on those conditions in which people thrive and the business impact of that. So that's been a brilliant foundation for me. It's probably fed through my natural approaches to all of the steps along my career to today.
Sarah Davenport
When you say how they were looked after, you mean from a leadership perspective?
Sarah Davenport
Yeah, where people take the time to know them, invest in them, and really create an environment where they are happy to come to work, feel supported, and enjoy what they're doing, even if it’s a really mundane task.
And one of the things they taught us there was to look after the people, to look after the customers. And I think that's true everywhere, and a lesson that I was really pleased to learn actually.
Oli Coote
And I think the sales process somewhere like Boots is a bit more consultative in many ways, isn't it?
Sophie Parker
Exactly.
Oli Coote
And so, if you've got that store manager who's making everyone feel valued and part of that team, that then bleeds through, doesn’t it, in terms of that service that the customer receives?
Sophie Parker
Exactly because your expectation for your team is that they're going to go above and beyond whatever the customer wants to know. If we don't have it, it's never a simple no, sorry, I can't help. There are always suggestions given about where somebody could go to find it. It reminds me a bit of the Miracle on 34th Street movie with Father Christmas, which is absolutely incredible, where if they can't sell it at that department store, they tell them where they can go or get it for a better price.
It's the idea that people can really trust you. You become a trusted advisor, and when you think about your teams, it's exactly the same thing, by knowing who they are, and who they are outside of work. What's important to them? Taking the time to ask them about that before they go after a very tiring and long shift makes a difference. You know, prioritise things like sorting out their holidays. They are the things that really make a huge difference. And I think if we create those conditions where people can thrive, the business takes care of itself.
Sarah Davenport
So, how did you transition? Because you obviously learned a lot of leadership skills, qualities, and good practices during your time there, is that what kind of underpinned it? Was it a purposeful move into learning, development, and talent, or was it accidental?
Sophie Parker
Well, it was quite accidental. I didn't realise that was what I was really passionate about. I think it's only with hindsight that you can see that there's a really common thread to the decisions that you make throughout your career. I learnt that that’s what I was really good at, seeing people and understanding them and being able to support them to be their best.
I have a natural, optimistic approach to people, assuming that everybody has incredible talent and potential. It's about putting them in the right place and giving them the right conditions. And the easiest way I find to describe it is by thinking about people as plants in your garden. Some people need a certain type of soil, a certain type of sunshine. While people don't want to be described as plants, I think it's the perfect way of really seeing what the difference is for that individual and making sure they have the right support around them, as well as the right opportunities and space.
So yeah, learning and development was an accidental discovery. After I left Boots, I went on to eventually become a Head of Quality. So, I joined the business kind of by accident. It happened to be in the data centre industry. I didn't know what the industry was. I saw the coolest office that was local to me, that did yoga classes twice a week, that had a gym, that took the team on ski trips, and had a “bar and beer Fridays”. And at that stage of my life, that unconventional fun seemed like a brilliant place that I'd want to be.
I didn't know anything about data centres or technology, really, at that point. I just knew that I wanted to help people get better at looking after customers. As part of my role there, I created a function, which we called the quality department, and the focus there was on improving the performance of our customer-facing teams. So, lots of performance coaching and again, making sure people were supported to go above and beyond for our customers. It was a wild place to work in many ways.
My key takeaway from there was that culture wasn't an afterthought, and it enticed me in, as a bit of a fun, mad place to be. That intentional culture of getting people together in teams to do specific tasks, work out, and work on our physical health had a huge impact on us being a high-performance team. And it's one of those other things that I think people don't really think about or see. We bring teams together, and we just expect them to be able to be brilliant, without thinking about what environment and culture we're creating to allow them to thrive.
Sarah Davenport
They obviously did that really, really well. You got the leadership aspect from Boots, the culture impact from your first kind of foray into the data centre world. How did you come to be at Pure and bring those together?
Sophie Parker
There's a lovely bit in between there, which I think is always a bit of my career that I find myself talking about a lot. It's really where I began to realise what my special skills were. So, whilst I was looking at that performance improvement and how we can help these people be better, what I learned was the key differentiator between those top performers. It wasn't the technical skills; it wasn't that they knew our products in a certain way; it was the soft skills. It was their ability to communicate, collaborate and their emotional intelligence.
So, what I did as part of my role there was to create a soft skills curriculum to go alongside our apprentices' technical training. And that is where I've really got a flavour and a taste for creating curricula and having a more strategic approach to improving people. It wasn't just about improving the one conversation then; it was about how I can take this individual and give them the core skills that traditionally we've never really been taught. And its luck of the draw whether you happen to be able to articulate your ideas. It worked brilliantly.
Many of those apprentices now run departments, some of them are running their own businesses. And I really think that's the difference when I think about talent, it's not technical understanding because you can learn that. It's the bit that we forget to teach people, which is how do I actually articulate my thoughts and ideas in a way that will influence others?
So, along the same time as creating that curriculum, I was also volunteering at Girl Guides. I'd moved to a new area and wanted to be a positive influence in the community. I thought spending my Monday evenings with 30 10-year-olds would be a good way to do that.
And what I found was that I was going from being in this really high-performance, high-tech, digital data centre world by day to a quiet, rundown church hall talking to a group of kids about the royal wedding and things that maybe have cultural significance in this country but aren't the things that are going to drive their careers forward and make them the powerhouses that that room of girls could be.
So, I managed to convince my employer at the time to sponsor a Girl Guide digital challenge badge. I worked with a number of our different engineers and asked them to help me create tasks that could be done in a rundown church hall with no technical equipment, which brought to life the variety of different technical roles in the data centre industry.
So, we had all sorts of things, like we acted out a play of what happens when you send a selfie to your friend, and we had people running around the room as different data packets and then sellotaping stuff back together. It really broke it down in a way that helped bring the fun of the industry to life.
Over that course of the year, we had 300 Girl Guides come into the business, and I ran an evening workshop for them to give them that taste of these cool things that are available to you, if you lean into them, STEM subjects, if they appeal to you. And then that was it. I got what I cared about. It was how do I get these underrepresented groups into the industry, and how do I help us create those pathways that aren't the obvious, rocking up to the school and telling them here's my job, which are really important. But that was something a little bit different that worked really nicely.
When it came around to me interviewing for Pure, I had a brilliant conversation with Dame Dawn Childs, and this leads quite nicely into my broader thoughts around talent and how we look at it. So, Dawn was interviewing a head of quality for a training manager role. She could quite easily have looked at that and gone. 'This person isn't going to be the right person for this role. Let's not even have the conversation.' She took the time to understand what it is that I'd actually done, with all the transferable skills that meant I could come straight in and totally smash that role.
Oli Coote
It's so interesting, because we talk so much at the moment about the broader educational piece of actually trying to get across to the public what data centres do, their role in society, and how critical they are. You walk down any street in the country, and unless it's maybe in Slough, a lot of people are going to have difficulty in articulating what a data centre is or describing it.
And then you go back and actually think about younger people and their awareness of it and understanding of it, and to put something like that in place. You know, when you did it in that way, that's the sort of game-changing initiative that we need a lot more of.
Sophie Parker
Yeah, I was really lucky at the time. I was working with some incredible people. One of those is Aaron Saxton, who's now the CEO of the Dame Robina Shah Foundation. He was our director of education, and in 2018, he made sure that we saw 60,000 students across Greater Manchester in one year. So, the educational outreach that I was exposed to and a part of there, was massive. It was really tactical, and I think it helped us get a lot of people from those underrepresented audiences into our apprenticeships. I really think that was a huge win for me. Being around that normalised it and made going out and doing something like that seemed like a totally normal thing to do. So yes, he's a great influence.
Sarah Davenport
What I love about that is that you brought the kind of softer skills element to people coming into the apprenticeship piece, but you then worked on more of the kind of technical education or bringing something invisible to life with the next generation of people coming in. But you obviously also worked in an environment that absolutely valued that broader, less instant commercial result approach, which is absolutely amazing to have that exposure.
And have you been able to bring that merging of influences from the leadership piece to the cultural piece to the softer skills piece to the kind of talent pipelining education piece? How are you bringing all of that together at Pure?
Sophie Parker
Pure is another one of those environments where ideas are encouraged. We come across problems regularly, and rather than just seeing them, we find a way to solve them. I think there's a lot of noise in the industry about this sort of shortage of talent, and I don't think that it's a shortage of talent. I think it's a shortage of how we view it and the imagination and curiosity we're bringing to it.
So, with the example of me coming into Pure, Dawn was able to see my skill set rather than my job title. What we're really good at doing at Pure is trying to solve those problems. We
now have educational outreach because we know it works and is helpful. It's also really nice to do with a data centre, part of the community. We want to be a data centre that does good. So, helping expose local people to the careers that are available is really helpful.
Last year, we also went to the STEM women graduate career fairs to further try attracting some of that underrepresented talent. And I think we're really good at sort of seeing things in different ways. It's not just here's a standard problem, we can't do anything about that. It's definitely an environment where you can bring great ideas and challenge the status quo, which I think is really important, particularly when we think about hiring managers.
It's not the case that you want a maintenance technician; therefore, they must have done that very specific role in our exact industry. Having the courage and the conviction to challenge that and say: What is the actual skill set that you need of that person? I think I'm able to do that in a way, where I'm able to view roles in terms of the skill sets rather than the years of experience.
Sarah Davenport
What you're saying is that it's not actually a talent shortage, but it's potentially a talent shortsightedness. And if you're looking at the demand of the data centre industry and the talent pool, you cannot deliver what you need to deliver without looking at it, without having a different pair of glasses on. So, I suppose one thing I'm interested in is what you think from a talent perspective are the biggest risks and equally opportunities when it comes to talent?
Sophie Parker
So, I was reading recently the Lovelace report, that We Are Tech Women and Oliver Wyman released, and that was talking about the largest opportunity and the largest risk for us is keeping the talent that we already have. I think as an industry we are getting much better at attracting and we put a lot of time and investment into attracting people to the industry. But their report highlighted that 40,000 women leave their roles and the industry each year.
That's a huge pool of talent. And this is mid-career talent. They aren't fresh and don't know what they're doing. There's a huge amount of skill there, and interestingly, only 3% of that was due to caring responsibilities. I think too often we assume that women are leaving because they've got young children or they don't want to have these promotion opportunities, which is absolutely not the case.
There's a long list of suggestions in that report about how we can address that. I think we need to look at how we retain our talent because you're right that there is a pool of talent, and we will very quickly run out of that talent unless we look more broadly and explore those very similar roles and very similar industries.
But first, I think we need to reflect on what we do as businesses that makes people want to stay with us, but also makes them want to stay in the industry? There are things like sponsorship, making sure that high-impact work is distributed fairly, but I would suggest that people look at that HR data and see where they are losing people in their business. Because if we're bringing loads of people in the front door, but the back door is wide open, we're just going to forever be on this cycle where we don't really fix the issue.
Oli Coote
Yeah. Because I mean, salary is just one part of it. And then it's meaningful work, its development, it's progression. Its values. It's the culture of the organisation. And you go back to what you were saying at the beginning, with regards to Boots, and how those individual teams feel about themselves, how they feel as a team and how that means they're then able to bring that into the role. It's interesting to sort of come back to that. Put that in the context of where you are at the moment or the industry more broadly rather.
Sophie Parker
Absolutely. And I think when we look at the industry, we think about the fact that people are retiring later. So, the average retirement age in the UK is now 66 apparently. But in data centres, one in five employees is already over 55. We're really close now to having five generations working side by side.
And there are a lot of upsides that can come with that. All those seasoned engineers can pass on decades of knowledge, and the younger team members can bring in those sorts of fresh approaches, and they're skilled in automation and AI. But there's a big watch out there: If we don't actively share and capture that knowledge, we risk losing critical expertise in a huge proportion, just as demand is rising.
Something that we're doing at Pure next year to help with that is setting up a reverse mentoring programme. I think that's such a fantastic way to engage people and get them to see each other's skill sets across generations. That there's a huge risk there if we just ignore it. We just ignore the fact that everyone's going to retire, all the women are going to leave. We can talk in all of the schools about how great it is to come to the industry, but there are two real, real risk factors there.
Sarah Davenport
Yeah. You're filling an empty bucket, or you're filling a bucket that's already got holes in it.
Sophie Parker
Exactly. Yeah.
Sarah Davenport
OK, so it's that revolving door piece. So, if you look at the retention, I'm not a head of talent like you are, but you've got an attraction piece, and you've got a retention piece and presumably a pipeline in. What is it that keeps you up at night from any strands of that topic, from a talent perspective?
Sophie Parker
What keeps me up at night is my 2-year-old daughter!
Sarah Davenport
Asking you what a data centre is! I'll rephrase it. What's the biggest headache or challenge that you've got?
Sophie Parker
That is your top priority as Head of Talent, helping people view roles in terms of a set of skills rather than the version of a person they think will be successful in that. We all have a natural bias, where we've worked with this person before, or knowing somebody who studied this particular thing will be good at this.
But the challenge for me is helping people breakthrough that and see the skills that I need from somebody to be successful in this, whilst also looking at their current team makeup. There's diversity of thought needed if we're going to solve the complex problems that we are trying to solve in as a business, as an industry.
There are always interesting challenges. But if everyone sitting around the table has already worked at the same business and has already faced all of the same challenges, there's only going to be one answer. And something I'm really passionate about is helping people break through that, be very intentional about the teams they are creating around them and not falling into the trap of I must hire somebody who's done a near identical role in a near identical world. We don't necessarily need that, particularly if you consider how quickly our industry is changing, and the technology is changing all the time. We need some freshness to that, and I don't think everyone's caught up with that yet.
Oli Coote
Yeah, I mean that that diversity of thought as you as you just said that speed of change with everything at the moment to look five years down the line, I think ok, well actually, this is about problem solvers and people that have got an open mind and can bring new ideas to the table to kind of help deliver on those sorts of things.
I suppose the interesting thing is how you tease that out? You know, in terms of you've obviously got a CV in front of you, and you can clearly see that this is where they've worked, and this is kind of what they've done. And so, it may or may not fit with what the hiring manager’s looking for. But then, in terms of getting through what you feel, actually, they're bringing more to the table here that we need to consider. How do you tease that out typically?
Sophie Parker
I think it's just smart questioning. Getting people to question themselves is really important. There's no complicated way of solving this. We just have to give ourselves the time to think and sometimes have somebody ask us some probing questions and sit us in silence. I did an executive course last year, which really helped me with those great, big open questions.
Sarah Davenport
I want to hear about that. One of my questions was going to be about how you challenge yourself to think differently, explore different avenues, and look through different lenses, as it were. And I was really keen to hear about your executive coaching because you're clearly passionate about all of that. How has that supported your personal growth and underpinned your day-to-day professional growth?
Sophie Parker
Doing that course has really helped me be a much better listener. In the past, people would have probably said I was a good listener, and I would have thought I was a good listener, but what I actually was doing was solving people's problems for them and not giving them the time and the silence. If people have their own answers, they're already emotionally invested in doing it the way that they thought would be best for them, rather than me saying, “Oh, have you tried it this way?”
And I think having coaching conversations with people really unlocks the potential within them. They see that they actually have answers and ideas, which feed back into that whole diversity of thought piece. We can't just have loud leaders who say this is the way we should do things. We need to ask everybody in the room how they think we should do things, and then different personalities come to play. Some people need to reflect on that. Some people come back to you later. I think it's ok to ask broad questions and leave them there for people.
My biggest learning is that I'm much better at listening now. While I will always want to solve everybody's problems and have 100 ideas of how we can do things, I have discovered that's not the best way to lead people or influence others.
Oli Coote
I suppose that process might take a little bit longer, because you're having those conversations, and some people come forward with an immediate thought, answer, or whatever it might be. And then other people, as you say, need to take that away, sit with it, and come back the following day. And I suppose that might mean that that process takes a little bit longer, but ultimately, you're arriving at an end result that's had a bit more of a kind of collective input.
Sophie Parker
Exactly. It's that the intent is in there from that individual because they've given it thought, rather than when we make change happen to people, it's always very uncomfortable. Whereas, if we let people feel in control of change, it's very smooth and very comfortable. And that goes back to those ideas about creating conditions in which people thrive. People have to feel like they are part of it.
And interestingly, when I speak to a lot of our talent within Pure, one of the key things they talk about why they stay here is the ability to influence what we do. People have voices here, and people listen, and when we think about the generational shift, more people coming in from a younger cohort, the driving values for those individuals are mission and purpose, which are becoming even more important to them. So being able to be part of the conversation, I think, is crucial in getting people really emotionally invested. If you want someone to perform at their best, they're more likely to do that if they are part of it; whether you go with their idea or not is by the by, but you've invited them to contribute and you've given them the space to think and reflect. And that's how we help people grow.
Sarah Davenport
So, it's almost slowing down in order to speed up.
Sophie Parker
Exactly, exactly.
Sarah Davenport
That's really interesting, and I think if you are naturally a fixer, you want to make it better immediately or oh, I know, why don't you do that, that, that and that. But you're right, actually, what have they learned? What have they developed in them, in themselves, by you giving them that answer? Presumably, that's the logic behind what do you know, not jumping in exactly what they think.
Sophie Parker
I'd literally have to sit on my hands, which I did for much of the practice during the course. It was quite an in-depth course, and they got us to practice this. We had to practice it with other people in the course. And yeah, I did have to do that a lot, bite my tongue and hold back. But it was very quick to realise the difference in the quality of the person's answer. I was convinced that that was how I needed to lead.
Sarah Davenport
I'm going to take that away.
Sophie Parker
That's a brilliant book. I would recommend Time to Think by Nancy Klein. That is a fab read to help you understand that. It really goes into the details and the statistics around the psychology of people feeling like they're part of it. It's brilliant.
Sarah Davenport
I'll be downloading that later. I'm a massive believer that throughout our careers, we don't necessarily know it at the time, but there are big influences. It might be a personal event, or it might be a work event, or it might be a person. I'm really interested in what that is for each person and how that has then underpinned how you practise moving forward. So, I'm keen on who your biggest influences have been, or you've obviously touched on that a bit already, but whether that be a person or a moment in time.
Sophie Parker
So, as you were saying that, my mum came to mind, and what she used to say to me when I was younger was, 'Did you try?' Whenever it came to any school test results, she never wanted to know what I got. She didn't care whether I was top of the class or bottom of the class. It was about the effort I'd put in, and that's always stuck with me, and now I'm seeing it come out of my mouth. Now that I've got young children, I will always try really hard, which comes from that. It's always in the back of my mind. Did you try? Because that's all that matters. Whether something is a success or failure, the judgement is, did you try? Because if you didn't try, then it's a failure. If you tried and it fails, then it's your first attempt in learning, which is a great acronym someone gave me recently. So, yeah, I would say my mum actually.
Sarah Davenport
Well, that's what you hear from the minute you're not able to understand, to being able to understand. And you clearly have tried a lot, like you've done so much. So, you've obviously, I always think, need to create a safe environment for people to fail and excel because ultimately, you don't learn anything from everything going smoothly.
Sophie Parker
And I also think having a support network around you is really a game-changer. I've been really fortunate with the Rising Star Awards. They've connected all of us together. We've got a WhatsApp group. There are regular texts on there asking for top tips on things. And it's like having a bunch of cheerleaders in your pocket, but also access to knowledge, and you can show the vulnerability of I actually don't know the answer to that. What would you do? And if I reflect on the career journey I've had, the points at which I've had a strong support network, I've really been able to play at my best.
I've seen that a lot more in our industry recently, that there are key people doing a fantastic job of bringing individuals together. Catriona Shearer is a fantastic example of that. She's everywhere, but she brings people along; she's a great connector, and she's introduced me to some people who have helped shape my thinking.
And there's some interesting work happening at the moment with Gem Plus One, who are really bringing together that networking opportunity for the younger generation to think about where those people are going to be in 10 years’ time. They've made those connections in a lovely way. They can stay in the industry and already have those. I think there's a real power in coming together. And that's what this industry is really good at. There aren't necessarily the silos of “Well, we won't share our approach to this.” And I love that.
Sarah Davenport
And I think that historically, even when we first started working with Pure, people would never talk about where the data centre is going to be. And I was thinking, how am I meant to find people if I can't tell you where you're going to be based? Anywhere in the world? Yeah, it will be one of four continents. That kind of closed doors. I'm quite good at doing a job with a hand tied behind my back, but not both of them. But I definitely think the doors have opened much more on that.
And a massive focus for us at Capstone is around creating communities. So, we've got our Capstone Mentored community, which I might try and drag you into, Sophie. But anyway, that's just laying the foundation. Kalbir’s part of it. Yeah, but that's been brilliant. And we're about to launch our second cohort of mentors and mentees. And that is part of our commitment to the retention piece.
There's the broader community piece where you are being linked up with talent and other talent leaders within the data centre sector? Because I've got that on the recruitment side. I'm in a WhatsApp group with over 200 recruitment leaders. Now that might be your idea of hell, but some of them are in completely different sectors, some are very similar, and people are so generous with their wins, their fails, anything that they think might help somebody. I'm on the phone to people all the time, sharing things that have gone well for us or vice versa. And I think we could do more of that in terms of a peer, whether it's on the engineering side, the talent side, or whatever side. I wonder about your views on collective impact in that way.
Sophie Parker
I think it's brilliant. And the more of it we can do, the better shared learning works. And that there's a lot of evidence about how we learn in a peer group, having more sort of transfer of knowledge, stickiness. So, I am all for getting a group of people together and talking about what works, what doesn't work and sharing those experiences. It will get us all further faster.
Oli Coote
There are little moments of insight from different contexts. That help us make other connections, thought connections that then help us to steer the thinking in a different way that either solves your immediate problem in front of you or actually then comes back and helps somebody else in that community. And I think it's something that the data centre sector does well, actually, the whole community. And the more of it the better.
Sophie Parker
Yeah, I agree.
Sarah Davenport
Do you go to many industry events?
Sophie Parker
So, it's only been a new thing on my radar this year. Part of that is that I'm based up north. Part of it is that I've got two young children, so they are both blockers to many of the great events, which are all London-based. I am very often at our London headquarters. So, when I'm here, if there's something happening and I can make it work, then yes, I do go. This year, an absolute highlight for me with DCAC in Dublin. An absolutely riot time, that was brilliant. Catriona Shearer invited me up on stage with her for a panel talk. I also managed to get a tattoo whilst I was there. It was fab.
Sarah Davenport
Was it Pure? Was it just Pure DC group?
Sophie Parker
Oh no. But we did tease Dawn with that for a moment to say that's what Sophie had done. I think some great events go on. And, I think there's more and more that I'm seeing come up that I would love to be able to go to, because this is the difference, isn't it? It's all coming together, knowing each other, and sharing those ideas.
Sarah Davenport
We're all part of the data centre ecosystem, and we've all got value. And we were in Amsterdam last week, Oli and I, and Oli was on a panel discussion there about talent, with the CEO of Green Mountain, with Isabella Kemlin over at the Swedish Data Centre Authority, and Sam Wicks from Vern. It's just all different geographies and expertise. But actually, there needs to be some collective thinking in terms of getting the talent right in the industry.
Sophie Parker
Yeah, especially when we think about the course opportunities there are that bring people in. We're still at a point where we don't have any sort of dedicated data centre technician qualification that you can go to a university or do an apprenticeship in. We're getting closer, and I've seen a lot of people supporting that in our industry. But the government takes time to put these things through. Curricula take a long time to come to be, and the more that as an industry, it's not for us to lead, but by all means, we can support and say this is what we need. When they are out of those qualifications, we'll be in a better place.
Oli Coote
Yeah. And having higher education, universities, etc., invested in that as well. If you think about how quickly everything's changing, and maybe five years from now, what's that going to look like? But if you've got that resource in those university contexts, for example, they're the ones that can help, be a bit more agile with that qualification, with that training, and so on, to help deliver people when they've graduated, to actually be ready to kind of come in and make a difference. That'd be amazing.
Sophie Parker
Yeah.
Sarah Davenport
I think one thing I'm keen to do in the new year is have a round table so we can start talking about some collective impact opportunities. Not going back to my fixer roots, but if I see a problem, it's like killing me not to be able to at least create some discussion around it. I really think that there is definitely an opportunity for us to do something around that because we need to change the narrative on what data centres are and what careers within data centres look like.
Because obviously, I bang on about it at home, and my 14-year-old is like, “Oh my God, that sounds so boring”. And I'm like, but you are amazing at maths, you're amazing at science. You are absolutely not a linear person. That's what we need. We need problem solvers and troublemakers like you. Like that's what we need. But I need to PR it more.
Sophie Parker
So, I really like the problem solvers and troublemakers. That is what we need in this industry. That is what gets you far. So, we need to go out there and get more of those.
Sarah Davenport
That's a strap line straight. There we go. This has got legs, Sophie. This has to be conceding. What are we looking for? Troublemakers and problem solvers. Literally, my child has that written all over them. Both of them. Excellent.
Sarah Davenport
So, if we look at what we should prioritise moving forward from a talent perspective, to bring the conversation full circle, what do you think that should be as an industry or in terms of talent specifically?
Sophie Parker
So, in terms of talent coming into the industry, it's about those softer skills. Are they curious? Are they problem solvers? Are they adaptable? Because you need to be adaptable. This is going to keep changing for us as an industry. We need to think about roles on a skills-based basis, not just I need an exact replica of the person that I've previously seen in that role. We need to get much better at seeing the transferable skills.
But importantly, I think it's asking ourselves, are we paying as much attention to our retention of talent as we are to our attraction of talent? Because I don't see that in the broader industry. At Pure, I really do that. That's a huge key part of my role. But I don't see versions of me in every business. And you think about the cost of bringing new people in. If everybody's leaving because we're not creating the right environment for them to thrive, then we're wasting money and time.
Sarah Davenport
Yeah, you're losing the investment that you've made, or you're just investing for somebody else to benefit if they're just going to recycle around the competitors. Yeah, exactly.
Sophie Parker
And I saw a great quote from Simon Sinek earlier this week, “100% of your customers are people, 100% of your team are people, 100% of your investors are people. So, if you don't take the time to understand your people, then you're not going to be a successful business.”
Sarah Davenport
Well, that's a mic drop end, isn't it?
Sophie Parker
Boom!
Sarah Davenport
She's gone!
Sophie Parker
But it's true; it's those people’s skills, isn't it? The people skills are what we need. We can learn the technical skills, but it's the people skills that create the differentiator and help people be the absolute top of their game, and therefore, businesses be the top of their game. And it's absolutely the skill that people do not associate with data centres. It's the people.
Sarah Davenport
OK, well, hold that thought, and let's carry that on in another forum. But Sophie, thank you so much for joining Oli and me. That has been brilliant. We've loved hearing your insight, and having a podcast series about data centres and talent would have been a big void without you. So, we're really thankful that you've taken the time to talk to us. That's brilliant.
Sophie Parker
Thank you for having me.
Oli Coote
Thank you.
Sophie Parker
It's been great to talk to you both.
That was an insightful conversation with Sophie Parker, Head of Talent at Pure Data Centres Group. Her experience, spanning retail, quality, and major infrastructure roles, provided invaluable perspectives into talent management, culture, and embracing a skill-based approach to hiring. She discussed how Dame Dawn Childs hired her based on her skill set rather than her job title, demonstrating a commitment to viewing talent broadly. Sophie is challenging the industry to overcome "talent shortsightedness" by focusing on soft skills and prioritising retention. Her commitment to using a data centre as a "part of the community" and ensuring the business "does good" by exposing local people to careers is helping to transform the sector’s talent pipeline. We are extremely grateful to Sophie Parker for joining Sarah Davenport and Oli Coote on Capstone Talent Talks.
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