Workforce leader warns of ‘elitist’ views on training

Virginia’s business community must demand that students are taught more relevant job skills and that the state allocate more cash for schools, according to the chairman of a board seeking to enhance Virginia’s workforce.

“Unfortunately, most of what we do is sit back and complain about the product coming out of the K-12 system,” said Robert Leber, chairman of the Virginia Workforce Council and director of education and workforce development for Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding in Newport News. “The business community needs to say, ‘You need to fund education.’”

Leber, speaking Thursday at a Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce luncheon, said it is imperative that Virginia’s business leaders urge local school systems to emphasize high-tech education so the United States stays competitive with emerging financial superpowers such as China and India.

“The business community has to have their impact on many different levels, including in the classroom,” Leber said. “Teachers are very good at following a curriculum. But they know nothing about the business workplace other than [having held] a summer job.”

While students should be well rounded, Virginia needs to emphasize technology and other much-needed job skills over liberal arts priorities such as the ability to read “The Great Gatsby” and write “a well-structured paragraph,” Leber said.

As the Charlottesville area attempts to beef up its high-tech industry, Leber said, the region must not be “elitist” and ignore workforce training.

“The truth is, you need a total workforce,” he said. “The people in these industries like to drive BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes. They’ll need mechanics to fix them.”

Frank Friedman, president of Piedmont Virginia Community College, said that looming budget cuts could curtail the Charlottesville area’s ability to train its workers. PVCC, like all state agencies, is drafting budget-cut plans that are due to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine today. The deeper the cut, Friedman said, the more likely that PVCC would have to curtail or eliminate educational programs and services for students.

“Whenever you impact the students, you’re impacting the region’s future workforce,” Friedman said.

Friedman added that PVCC is seeing a record level of enrollment, making the forthcoming cuts even more painful.

“This is the time we should be hiring additional staff,” he said.

Chamber of Commerce President Christopher Lee, of the construction firm R.E. Lee & Son, said that boosting workforce development in the Charlottesville area is “critical.” Local businesses, including his own, he said, rely on PVCC, the Char-lottesville-Albemarle Tech-nical Education Center and the one-stop Charlottes-ville Workforce Center to provide an employable workforce.

“It’s a critical issue,” he said. “Having this forum today speaks to that.”

Rosy hiring outlook

Charlottesville-area employers appear to have a positive outlook when it comes to hiring new employees. A new Manpower survey of businesses found that 60 percent of Charlottesville-area companies surveyed intend to hire more employees in the fourth quarter of 2008. Meanwhile, 13 percent plan to cut staff and 27 percent expect no change. The report listed construction, public administration, transportation/public utilities, finance/insurance/real estate and education as the best industries for job prospects.

The survey put the Charlottesville region in a three-way tie for having the nation’s sixth-rosiest job outlook heading into the end of 2008.