Strengthening DC’s school-to-career pipeline

Here in the DC region, we have a large community college establishment, and the largest is Northern Virginia Community College. We’re joined by Steven Partridge, the vice president of workforce and economic development at the Northern Virginia Community College. With 70,000 students right now at NVCC, and many of them are involved in technology. In fact, just its cybersecurity program has grown from 50 to 1500 students in only four years. There’s clearly something going on in the region with respect to skills education, and it might just be a fantastic opportunity for D.C.

ABERMAN: Steve, first of all, thanks for joining us.

PARTRIDGE: Thank you for having me.

ABERMAN: Well, it seems to me that, from the work that I’ve been doing in the region, skills development has become a bigger and bigger issue, even more so than just plain education. You’re in the middle of that. Is that so?

PARTRIDGE: Definitely. We hear from employers every day that tell us they cannot find individuals with the skills they need. So, there’s somewhat of a skills mismatch going on, which is concerning because it does tell us that, do we release send the market signals to students when they’re in college, or even in high school, to really what the businesses need? If you want to stay in D.C., what skills do you need to get that high paying job? How do you get there? All these things, we don’t always do a very coordinated effort in doing.

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ABERMAN: And certainly, work that organizations like the Greater Washington Partnership has been doing, some data I’ve seen from LinkedIn, and so forth, there are 30 or 40 thousand IT, software, design jobs right now that are vacant because of this mismatch you describe.

PARTRIDGE: Yeah. It’s a rolling number. So that means, they’re vacant today, those will get filled, but it’s a constant number that we have a mismatch of supply and demand. We need to probably double or triple the number of graduates in IT over the next ten years, just to keep up with today’s demand, let alone any sort of future opportunities like Amazon’s headquarters, or other companies that move to market.

ABERMAN: It, traditionally, has seemed to me that, when people talk about “skills development,” or talk about a community college, there’s a classist sort of vibe to it, that you get your hands dirty or something. Do you think that’s still the case?

PARTRIDGE: I think there is sort of belief that college, higher red, is sort of the white collar track to get a bachelor’s degree, and that community college is sort of for everyone else that’s not college-ready. I think what we’re finding more is that a lot of our students that show up already have a bachelor’s degree. Many come back to us saying you know, I’ve got an English major, and now I’m looking for a job, and I realized I need some tech skills to augment that. They come back and either get a certificate, or some industry credentials to help them get that foot in the door.

ABERMAN: Do you think that part of the problem is that we haven’t really caught up with the reality, which is that digital competency is as, if not more important now, than reading and writing?

PARTRIDGE: Yeah. Virginia just passed that first mandatory standards in computer science for K-12, so, over the next year or two, teachers will be trained across the Commonwealth on these standards, that’ll be incorporated from kindergarten all the way through high school, because there’s a recognition that it’s a competency, just like writing, reading, and that it has to be part of your everyday learning.

Without it, you really aren’t set up to succeed in today’s workforce. Tech is in every industry. You try to find a tech job, it’s sometimes hard, because we always thought of the tech industry as a sector unto itself. And now, really, tech is embedded in every industry. You might have a retail job, but you use technology as much as you would in banking, or finance, or other industries.

ABERMAN: Yeah, I describe it as digital convergence. I think that here, this region leads the nation in digital convergence. You can’t do anything here, whether it’s biotechnology or cybersecurity or anything in between, without having a technology background now.

PARTRIDGE: A lot people don’t realize that the northern Virginia and the D.C. market is one of the highest concentrations of IT jobs in the nation. We’re the highest concentration of cyber jobs from a posting standpoint. So, this is where it’s all happening right now. Silicon Valley, D.C., but people don’t think of the D.C. market as a tech industry.

ABERMAN: An yet, employers are. Tell me about how you’re seeing employers adopt, because my understanding is that NVCC is doing a lot of partnering now directly with the employers, to shape programs, to help people actually have the skills employers need.

PARTRIDGE: Yeah. If you don’t start with the employer as the end goal. I think that there’s a lot of things in higher ed that you don’t think of, that the goal of higher ed really is getting people jobs. We put it in this esoteric way of saying it’s to make you better citizens, to give you life skills. It’s really about employment, all the way down the pipeline, all the way back to K-12, and we’ve lost sight of that in some ways. So, making sure we’re talking with the employers regularly about what they need, but listening, too, about what the things they actually value. They talk about making sure they’re work-ready, and you listen to them about what work-ready means.

We often think it’s technical skills. Some of it is: can you write? Can you communicate? Can you work in teams? These are what you and I might call soft skills, and they’re very valuable and underrepresented in the graduates coming out of today’s universities. So, the complaint is that we need to do more of that. Some of that might be that people are deferring work. A generation ago, two thirds of high school students would graduate having some sort of summer work experience, or an internship. Now, less than a third do. So, many of the students coming straight out high school into the universities or colleges, are picking majors never having stepped in the workplace, never having really explored opportunities. So, those soft skills that you get on the job, we’re not seeing them as much.

ABERMAN: Virginia, as a state government, does am awful lot to try to promote workforce development. How do you respond to people who say that, ultimately, the market self-adjusts, and the free market left alone will solve all these problems, and government doesn’t have a role?

PARTRIDGE: Well, I agree. I think the market will adjust. It may not adjust the way local or state officials may want. If we can’t find enough people to work in these high tech jobs in the D.C. area, we’ll find a solution, but it might be moving those jobs out of market. Other communities, Nashville, Charlotte, that have maybe better cost of living, maybe more plentiful IT talent that you can get at a lower price point, might be solutions for some companies. We don’t want that, obviously. We want to keep those high-paying jobs, those high-skill jobs, here in our market. So, we do have to provide an environment, just like we invest in roads, we have to invest in education.

ABERMAN: I agree with that. I also would note that many of the new technologies are going to make redundant tasks largely done by machines, so most people know how to work with technology, they’re going to be roadkill.

PARTRIDGE: Yeah. That’s something that we worry a lot about, because I think getting a college degree now, when you might have a fifty-year work life, is never going to set you up for success. So, we need to think of the college degree. We’ve always talked about lifelong learning as something we know we have to do, but we’ve never really had a structured way of doing it. I think we now need to realize that the life cycle, that the time a skill exists, especially in the IT world, is about five years.

ABERMAN: So, I’m in the workforce now. I’m out of college, maybe I haven’t gone to college yet, how do I find out about your programs, and how do I apply?

PARTRIDGE: If you visit our website, nvcc.edu, there’s a button that says “workforce development.” We put a lot of research into what the jobs are in Northern Virginia, and how you get to those jobs. So, if you are trying to make a career switch, out of another field, into IT, often the question is, do I need to go back and get another degree? What do I do to get there? We’ve mapped out, on our career ladders, spelled out that this credential, plus that credential, plus these skills or experiences, lead you into an entry level job.

Part of the challenge of the job market is this sort of inefficiency of supply and demand matching up, because people get stuck in these degrees, and HR departments are notorious about saying, I need this skill, this computer program, and if you don’t have that, we’re not even going to look at you. You get kicked out of the system. And so, the more we can do to be a translator between the business and the workforce, is a huge role for education to play.

ABERMAN: Well, there’s no doubt my mind NVCC is an important connector in solving a big issue, and for those of you that are thinking about a career change. a great place to begin your search. Steven Partridge, thanks for joining us.

PARTRIDGE: Thank you.

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