Will the (Work)Force Be with Us?
A Sweeping Regional Initiative is Underway to See that It Is
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Chaired by Fred Sargent, CEO of Sargent Electric, the initiative is a massive, multi -year, effort,
involving several hundred business and community leaders serving on steering committees, the
region’s workforce development boards, the Pennsylvania Economy League’s Workforce
Connections, local foundations and thousands of organizations and executives. And it’s a hot
area. The healthcare summit alone attracted 700 participants.
Says Chris Brussalis, President and CEO of The Hill Group, Inc., which is serving as coordinator
for the initiative: “We know that human capital is a significant, if not the most important, driver in
economic development. Companies locate and stay in a region based on the abundance, quality
and preparedness of the workforce.
“For the first time in our region, we’re getting the demand side of workforce development together
with the supply side, to understand the needs of employers and align the workforce development
infrastructure with those needs, so we can feed them workers who are ready and prepared. It’s
one of the first times it’s been done on this scale anywhere in the nation.”
Rather than working on quick fixes to plug employment holes, the summits are targeting
fundamental strategies.
“It’s not just dialogue for the sake of dialogue, not just talk about how bad the problem is,” says
Jeanne B. Berdik, Vice President of Workforce Education for the Pittsburgh Technology Council
and the Southwestern Pennsylvania Industrial Resource Center (SPIRC) and a member of the IT
summit steering committee. “The idea is to bring the stakeholders together . . . to create some
sort of blueprint for action.”
Here’s a look at the action to date.
Information Technology
Employment figures for the IT sector nationally are mixed. According to the Information
Technology Association of America, the sector’s leading trade organization, more than 10.4
million people in the U.S. work in IT, a one-year gain of four percent. However, in ITAA’s seminal
workforce study called When Can You Start?, hiring managers told ITAA they expect a shortfall of
425,000 IT workers this year.
For our region, this represents both a challenge and an opportunity.
“Right now we’re on the cusp of becoming great,” Brusallis says, “of having enough concentration
to make our region a destination consideration for firms. Or we can just get by. We need to do the
things to put us over the edge to make us great.”
The IT summit — co-chaired by Steven Zylstra, President and CEO of the Pittsburgh Technology
Council and SPIRC, and David Nelsen, President and CEO of CoManage Corporation — has not
finalized its action plan, but recommendations likely will focus on three related areas: growing and
retaining a pool of rofessionals to provide IT companies with the human capital for growth;
developing and retaining IT professionals to work for non-IT companies; creating widespread IT
literacy among our youth to ensure that the pipeline is full . . . and that our young talent remains in
the region.
The latter is a particularly pressing need. A study by the Center for Economic Development at
Carnegie Mellon University shows that during the decade of the ’90s, the “brain drain” of grads
with technical degrees continued. During that period, 67 percent of local graduates with business
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