Tech Center Would Keep Talent Pool

While tech-sector stocks have been looking bearish lately, early interest in a regional tech training center seems definitely bullish.

A supportive group of 45 or so from business, education and government met Thursday at the Community Colleges of Spokane administration building to continue to organize the effort introduced a few months ago at a Symposium meeting.

The vision, articulated by the meeting organizer, CCS Chancellor and CEO Charles Taylor, is for an Inland Northwest Center for Advanced and Emerging Technology.

The center would provide trained and certified information technology workers and is patterned after a similar center at Bellevue Community College.

Part of the idea is to cut our losses.

Spokane School Superintendent Gary Livingston said the area is losing many of the “top 15-20 percent of our high school students — the students who take advanced placement classes” — to schools and businesses outside the area. And they are not coming back, he added.

“We are losing our talent pool,” Livingston said, urging development of opportunities for students.

Livingston added that in 1994 Spokane School District 81 had just eight classrooms wired for computers.

Now, he said, 1,800 classrooms are wired and district students are registering “4,000 hits a second” on the Internet.

“They’ll be coming (to work or college) well prepared,” he said.

The business community suffers losses, too, when layoffs or turnover forces workers to leave town.

One such loss was avoided by implementing a quick retraining program, said Mary Averett of the community colleges’ Institute for Extended Learning.

At the same time Itron was laying off a number of technical workers, including some software engineers, another firm was seeking Web developers. The firm could not wait two years for program graduates.

Averett said the college was able to put together an intensive training program — “four hours a night, four nights a week” — for some of the Itron workers who were able to quickly grasp the skills needed. A graduation celebration for the group is scheduled this week.

Averett said the example is “a job-jump program for people with a certain skill level, but with a gap.”

Itron’s Roger Ingbretsen added that “quick response is so critical” in these situations, that “we need to set up a system so we can react quickly.”

Taylor said the new tech center would provide “demand-driven education. We will respond to the demands of this region, even if we have to move away from the traditional one-quarter, 12-week programs.

“We need to train individuals with the skills you (in business) demand, not what we’d like you to have,” said Taylor.

Don Lightfoot, an Eastern Washington University faculty member and biotech entrepreneur, said biotech technicians stay on the job, on average, just two years and high-tech work forces average 25 percent turnover each year. “That’s a tremendous burden for employers,” Lightfoot said.

Economic Development Council President Mark Turner agreed: “The pace of change is phenomenal.”

Vaughan Stensrud of The Northwest Group cited another key reason for the area’s talent drain: “Salaries and pay scales here must match the West Side (of the state)” to keep people here.

Collaboration was a common theme Thursday.

Several participants talked about involving staff from high-tech businesses as teachers and having college instructors and students as workers and interns to keep skills updated in both business and academia. Scholarships should be endowed for biotech and high-tech learning opportunities.

Judi Williams of Telect said it’s also important to get math and science teachers from high schools, middle schools, and even the 4th-, 5th- and 6th-grade levels involved so they can inspire their young students about the opportunities.

And Taylor talked about loaned executives from business working at the center to help further mutual understanding.

Funding for the center also would be a collaborative effort, involving grants from the state and National Science Foundation, some to be matched by private-sector support.

Dan McConnon, of the state Board for Community & Technical Colleges in Olympia, offered praise and caution.

“You have a huge advantage in this community, because business and education have a history of working together,” McConnon said, citing the area’s leadership in the WorkFirst welfare to work retraining programs.

But he cautioned that despite “a lot of good ideas and a lot of energy, you can’t do everything at one time. You must sharpen the focus on your program demands, and you are in position to do that,” McConnon said.

Taylor, putting the effort on a fast track, said the deadline for a concept proposal to NSF is May 20.

“The train is leaving the station and some people are not even aware of where the station is yet,” Taylor told the group.

The railroad metaphor is appropriate in a city that grew as a railroad town. Whether this effort is on the right track will depend on how well executed the idea is and how many in the community support the concept.

As noted, some of those trains heading out of the area have irreplaceable talent on board.