Will the (Work)Force Be with Us?
A Sweeping Regional Initiative is Underway to See that It Is
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degrees stayed local. Of those with computer degrees, only 30 percent remained in the region, while only 21 percent of engineering grads stuck around.

“The primary focus is to make sure we have the long-term human capital investment in IT professionals for IT companies that can grow the sector in this region,” says Berdik. “You can’t attract new companies or grow existing companies if you don’t have the IT professionals to support that growth.

“But very close behind that is the goal of technology literacy. If you don’t have a ready pool of people who can move up the ranks, you won’t grow the economy at all. We’ll try to address all three areas. It’s kind of a matrix: How do you develop that kind of skill base? How do you attract it? How do you retain it?”

The IT action plan likely will recommend leveraging existing programs and resources, but harnessing them in new joint initiatives. Berdik says the Council and SPIRC already are at work on two literacy-building initiatives that could be adopted as part of the overall IT plan. In one program, underwritten in part by the GE Fund, the Council and its partners are working to develop an IT curriculum and teacher training program in the South Side School District in Beaver County.

“What we’re finding is that professional development of the teachers is a big issue,” Berdik says. “They don’t feel comfortable with IT instruction, they don’t know how to teach these things, they don’t know how to integrate IT into the curriculum across the board. So we will be designing professional development intervention for the teachers to address some of the gaps in the curriculum.

“We’re hoping this kind of initiative will be seen as a model for how we need to approach it. Getting agencies, schools, community-based organizations and workforce investment boards to work off the same page is key.”

The second program is designed to provide school districts with the tools and incentives for a more collaborative approach to IT instruction.

Explains Berdik: “The potential is there to have 150 school districts, each one independently running a digital school district project, each one independently going to their employer community around whatever platform they’ve designed. Now how ridiculous is that? It’s an exaggeration, but it does happen.”

To establish an alternative model, the council and SPIRC are partnering with three Westmoreland County high schools to teach manufacturing-based, high-erformance skills to 24 students over a 30-hour program. Westmoreland County Community College and the Eastern Westmoreland Career and Technology Center are providing teacher training, 15 participating employers will provide internships for the students, and the Westmoreland-Fayette Investment Board will offer additional support.

It’s that cluster of employers and service providers that Berdik says could function at the epicenter of IT literacy development. She calls it “The Galileo Model.”

Healthcare

At first blush, the prognosis for the region’s healthcare sector appears, well, healthy. Employment in the sector grew by nearly 26 percent between 1993 and 1998; all other industries experienced an average growth rate of 6.6 percent in that period. Healthcare workers accounted for 15.4

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