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High-Stakes High Technology in Northern Virginia

Sometimes I take out my old slide rule and look at it with nostalgia. When I was in college back in the 1950s, we math majors used to carry slide rules around on our hips, much like carpenters hitch hammers to their belts.

Today students at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) don't carry slide rules. Many of them don't even know what a slide rule is. But thanks to the information technology revolution, they have laptop computers and other tools that help them expand their knowledge in ways that we could barely imagine during my college days.

No community college in the country has a bigger stake in information technology than ours. Technology is the signature industry in Fairfax County, where NOVA has its administrative offices, as well as in the rest of Washington's Northern Virginia suburbs. Our region may not get as much national attention as Silicon Valley in California or Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, but we've got just as much going on at our 1,600 technology companies. Over the past 20 years, Northern Virginia's technology sector has created a new job every 90 minutes.

Community colleges address the needs of their local communities. In Detroit, they provide skilled workers for the auto industry. In Southwest Virginia, there's a coal mining program. The biggest need in Northern Virginia right now is for an estimated 19,000 skilled workers in our booming information technology companies.

Companies in our region now regularly steal employees from each other. Executives joke about it, but they're dead serious about the necessity to fill these jobs as soon as possible. The bidding for these workers sends the wage base way up. The last figures I saw put the average salary of a technical worker at $55,000.

We're not shirking a bit from the challenge of helping fill these jobs. NOVA has grown from 3,000 students when I came here in 1968 to an enrollment of 60,000 students in credit courses and 250,000 in non-credit programs. It's one of the largest community colleges in the nation.

But we can't fill this technology gap alone. That job is too big for any single institution.

That's why the public schools, local governments, businesses, four-year colleges and NOVA joined together to form the Northern Virginia Regional Partnership, which I chair. We think this can be a national model for developing and implementing a strategic plan to promote economic competitiveness.

We're going to set up a work-force development coordinating center that will provide one-stop shopping for employers seeking workers. We want the companies to come to us and tell us what their training needs are. Young people or older workers seeking to change careers will be able to come to the centers for the education and training that these jobs require.

NOVA will work with the public school systems in Northern Virginia to tell students of the careers opportunities -- and the $55,000-a-year salaries -- in the technology industry. Also, we want to bring business leaders into the schools and make them partners with the students in defining career goals.

George Mason University in Fairfax, our region's state-supported university, also has a big role to play. GMU will conduct an annual analysis and forecast to guide development of the training and education programs.

The university also will be showcasing our region's strength as a high-tech center to the rest of the country and the world. Next June, George Mason will host the World Congress on Information Technology, which is expected to attract more than 1,500 information technology executives from 50 countries.

I think it's a coup. Visitors from Asia and Europe will be impressed with the number and quality of our high-tech firms. I plan to attend and am willing to bring along my slide rule, if anyone wants to take a look.

-- Richard J. Ernst

is president of Northern Virginia Community College and chair of the Northern Virginia Regional Partnership.

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company

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