A Recipe for Sustainable Job Growth Requires The Long-View

Wise, Va. — The transformational globalization of the local economy by the foreign outsourcing of textile jobs to Mexico and call center jobs to India requires local academic, government, and business leaders to formulate longer-term work force development plans for sustainable job growth.

By: My Wise County

http://www.mywisecounty.com/news/030104-2.htm

(Thanks to Dan Ripke for passing this along. Russ)

While Wise County’s Lonesome Pine Regional Technology Park may never reach the size of North Carolina’s Research Triangle, or the so-called Route 28 of Boston, or of Silicon Valley near San Francisco, now is the time to forge plans to link academic institutions to creation of a new local high-technology, engineering, and science skilled knowledge workforce.

Global job competition has required third-world nations to provide the science, mathematics and engineering skills to compete with American labor over the past decade. And, they have, with growing success.

Low-tech call center jobs and other computer and software engineering service jobs are moving offshore to India, China, Russia, and other foreign locations at an alarming rate leaving thousands of domestic job losses in the exit wake.

The United States will experience continued demand for high-tech science and engineering jobs to drive business innovation and product creation. The knowledge economy job opportunity leaves the coalfield region with the challenge to make the necessary communitywide effort to work force education.

Positioning to effectively compete and grow the economy in the global business market environment is essential. The net effect of recent job relocation announcements is the we are not be asked, we are being told to "think globally and act locally."

RESOURCE REALITY AND THE CLUSTER

Regional and local leaders must begin to come to terms with longer-term solutions to economic problems and not waste precious tax resources on the short-term job creation that requires little to no higher education skills but jobs lasting only for 24-to-60 months before being crushed in the next cycle of globalization outsourcing.

Such a cycle is a human and financial resource tragedy.

An effort to change the economy to such a true knowledge economy will take focus, determination, and celebrated incremental progress over a sustained period of time before the larger economic divident is realized.

Economic clustering and economic gardening theory requires the serious leader to take account of the community’s strongest asset: education.

Wise County has over 1,500 public education and higher education workers who can change the economic destiny of the community through their professional endeavors ponited in a more clever direction and with the resources.

KNOWLEDGE WORKER CREATION

Among those leading the effort to change to a knowledge economy are some of the the academic leaders of The University of Virginia’s College at Wise with growth in student numbers combined with more specific plans to start new programs in computer science and software engineering.

Expanding the student population from 1,500 to 2,500 over the balance of the decade will have a profound economic multplier effect on Wise County and the surrounding area if the college growth plans are successful.

The impact on the local housing market will be felt this fall in the more immediate Wise-Norton area as 500 new freshmen college students come to the campus many willing to stay to work as a skilled workforce.

The UVA-Wise Commission on Science and Engineering has reported progress on the start-up of computer science and software engineering programs over the next three-to-five years requiring additional faculty, labs. This academic effort must adcance with all deliberate speed.

The first tentative steps are underway now with the planned hiring of new full-time professors in computer science, physics, and science that could draw not only locals but students from nothern Virginia, throughout the United States, Turkey and other nations.

To prepare the next generation with the workforce skills to be competitive in the global knowledge economy, it is necessary that some bold steps be taken to change from the traditional to a more modern science and technology driven skill sets needed for the local knowledge-based workforce in the years ahead.

THE PHYSICS SYMBOL

One such incremental step is now being discussed by local policymakers to offer an advance placement in calculus-based physics for high school students at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. Such a program would be designed to prepare more local students for higher education study in science and engineering at The University of Virginia’s College at Wise.

Yet another possible avenue of workforce development is the creation of a pre-engineering program in the region’s community colleges to serve as a feeder for the planned computer science and software engineering schools at The University of Virginia’s College at Wise.

LAW AND CHEMISTRY

Neighboring Buchanan County leaders are making extented efforts in a similar direction with the establishment of the Appalachian School of Law in the 1990’s; and, now, the proposal to establish the Appalachian University focused on pharmacy and creating career pharmacists.

Development plans and policy changes do not go without critics.

One critic of the transformational high-technology workforce idea says that such a plan fails to consider the poverty in the local population and the lack of interest in computer science, software engineering, mathematics, physics, and science.

"This is Wise County," he exclaimed. "We need jobs for the unskilled or the less-skilled now."

Change may require some social and cultural re-engineering along the way to avoid the axiom: "this is the way we have always done it" attitude and typical resistence.

THE DYNAMO OF CHANGE

The dynamo of the cultural change must be made through importation of large numbers of young people for higher education while at the same time retaining and investing in local youth to stay and seek higher education skills too. Bringing an large educated pool of skilled workers together in one spot is the single most important change agent.

But to avoid the repeated cycles of short-term job purchasing and job crushing, investment in human capital is the best long-term insurance to lasting vertical job growth.

The potential of The University of Virginia’s College at Wise to attract hundreds of new young residents to provide the workforce needed for computer science, software engineering, business management is real. It will be the hundreds of UVA-Wise grads that will transform the nearby Tech Park into a vibrant community of small business innovation.

Job creation in software engineering, computer science, and info-tech business management, and marketing will, in turn, create jobs for housing and commercial construction, automobile repair, restaurant workers, bank tellers, public school teachers, municipal government service workers, and the like.

The global economic engagement will not be easy but it must started, and it must be done. Local leaders can not bury heads in the sand of an instant low-skilled economy.

Investing more in local long-term human capital, even if it means sacrifice in the short-term, is the only path to succeed in sustainable development. In addition, recruitment and relocation of bright young minds to the region will make a significant difference to the work force.

The Lonesome Pine Tech Park worker population can be among the highest skilled labor force in America if leaders embark on a planned course with self esteem, confidence, investment, and an unbending determination to compete in the global market place that is upon us.

The ever repeating cycle of short-term employment and unemployment may only be broken when leaders dedicate the community to creation of a science and engineering skilled, high-demand sustainable human work force.

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