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Summit Seeks to Pare Technology Worker Gap

Washington area business and university leaders are banding together to seek solutions to an acute shortage of technology workers in the region and to find ways to sharply increase opportunities for technology education and work force training.

A summit meeting on the technology worker shortage is planned for late March or early April at the Northern Virginia Center in Falls Church, recently opened by the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the University of Virginia to provide adult classes. Sponsors of the conference include the technology councils of Northern Virginia, suburban Maryland and Greater Baltimore.

"The goal is to get everybody at the table and talk about this one issue," said David Lucien, one of the conference organizers and president of Interpro Corp., a Reston consulting and planning firm..

Addressing this worker shortage is critical to the region's image and prospects as national technology center, said Dyan Brasington, president of the Suburban Maryland High Technology Council.

"Collaboration is important because we are one marketplace," she said. "There are many similar industries in our marketplace and to grow a talent pool and keep it within the region is going to be key to the success of many of our companies."

The inability of Washington area technology companies to fill job vacancies -- including openings for network technicians, software programers and systems analysts -- has been called one of the region's gravest economic challenges, one that is costing companies millions of dollars in lost commercial business and government contracts.

George C. Newstrom, head of the government division of Electronic Data Systems Corp. in Herndon, called the worker shortage a potential "killer" for local information technology companies such as EDS.

No precise tally of information technology job vacancies in the region is available, but one leading trade group has concluded that as many as one job in four nationwide is unfilled. That would translate into a shortage of as many as 10,000 technology workers locally, said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, which conducted the nationwide survey.

The Washington region had more than 262,000 technology workers at 2,300 companies in 1994, generating $21 billion in direct revenue -- 16 percent of the region's total economic output, according to a survey by George Mason University in Fairfax.

The conference's planners hope to immediately increase the graduate and mid-career training opportunities at community colleges, university graduate centers and technology companies by producing job descriptions that detail the skills prospective employees must possess. They also seek to send a clearer signal to college and high school students about opportunities for technology workers in the region.

"There are thousands of openings we can't fill because of the bottlenecks that are occurring in education. All of us in business and education need to partner together to deal with the technology training deficit," said Judy C. Pearson, director of the Northern Virginia Center.

The conference could produce an entirely new curriculum for students preparing for technology careers, said Jane M. Shaab, executive director of the Greater Baltimore Technology Council.

And by creating a regional focus for the campaign, organizers say they hope to prevent potentially costly and inefficient competition between Virginia and Maryland political leaders for technology workers. "We have to do it on a much more cooperative basis," Lucien said.

Ultimately, the governmental share of the education costs is a state issue. But a common approach to defining the problem is essential, said April Young, executive director of the Potomac Knowledgeway in Reston, which runs a Web site for technology entrepreneurs.

"It's in everybody's self-interest to come up with a regional solution," said Young, one of the conference's sponsors.

The collaboration the conference hopes to spur could be most beneficial for Maryland, where employment growth has suffered. The state ranks 44th nationally in employment growth -- increasing jobs by only two-tenths of 1 percent from 1990 to 1995.

"It just seems like common sense that the region should be working together on the issues of work force development," said Richard P. Clinch, program manager of the Maryland Business Research Partnership at the University of Baltimore. "Who cares if they [workers] are trained in the District, Virginia or Maryland? [States] grow better when they are working together, not at war with each other."

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company

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