As you all know, Blueprint Virginia is a comprehensive effort to provide business leadership, direction and long-range economic development planning for Virginia.  This year long initiative is bringing together all sectors of economic development to craft a strategy that will acknowledge and build on current regional plans and industry strategies. Blueprint Virginia will present our elected officials a roadmap for economic competitiveness for the Commonwealth

Throughout the process, participants have communicated their top priorities to ensure Virginia’s economic competitiveness. Let me sum up the big picture for you in three words:  education and workforce.  These are the top concerns for the business community and they show up throughout our work on Blueprint Virginia. Professor Steve Fuller at George Mason helped frame our entire effort when he told the Education and Workforce Industry Council that in the next decade, “the jobs will go where the well trained workers are.” We would be wise to heed his advice.

Let me give you just a few examples from my own observation:

▪    In health care, we have a growing shortage of physicians and many other types of health professionals, from advanced practice nurses to technicians.  While our political debate focuses on paying for health care, and that is without question an important issue, a more fundamental question is whether we will have enough well trained professionals to provide the compassionate, high quality care that our growing and aging society needs.

▪    In the utility world where I work, we are always on the lookout for well-trained, smart engineers to run some of our state’s most high tech and expensive equipment and to help us plan for the technology we will deploy in the future.

▪    In advanced manufacturing, we need highly skilled workers to help us leverage today’s low domestic energy prices to help bring manufacturing jobs back from overseas.  Let me be clear on this point, thanks to low energy prices and the high quality of our workforce, the U.S. is bringing manufacturing jobs home and Virginia is working hard to claim our share, in fact our goal should be more than our share.

On a more general note, throughout our state’s economy, we are relying on both the hard work and the retirement worries of the Baby Boom generation to be the backbone of our workforce. As a proud Baby Boomer myself, I recognize that this over-reliance is not sustainable.  We should absolutely do everything that we can to encourage mature workers to remain productive, to keep their skills current, and to mentor the next generation.  That said we need workforce reinforcements and we need to begin integrating younger workers into our workforce. 

The gloom of the Great Recession is passing, we have moved from worries about energy shortages to discussion of how to manage energy abundance, and we have all emerged leaner, stronger, and more resilient after the economic trials that began in 2008.  The time for economic defense is over.  We are now playing offense, both nationally and globally, and we need the next generation of workers to help us succeed.

That is why the investments that we make in education and workforce at all levels, starting with early childhood are so important.  We have outstanding early childhood programs in Virginia, but we have gaps in access and do not have what anyone would describe as a coherent system.

We have had a successful generation of education reform in K-12 and now it is time to focus on the next steps in excellence.

• First, we need to further increase our emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering Math, and Healthcare education (STEM-H as the acronym goes).

• Second, we need to keep asking the next big question in education reform, how do our K-12 reforms translate into long-term performance in the workplace and in post-secondary education. We have been focusing on translating K-12 success into the first year of post-secondary education or in the work force; it is now time to take an even broader view.

• In higher education, we are fortunate to have the comprehensive, consensus work the Virginia Business Higher Education Council and their “college, knowledge, and jobs” agenda to help us chart a path forward for our world-class higher education system.

▪   Let me highlight just a couple of their key findings.  First, as with K-12 education, we need a greater emphasis on STEM-H training, not just with science, math, and engineering majors but also with liberal arts majors.  We should remember that many of the great scientists of the Enlightenment had educations in the classics.

▪   Second, we need stronger linkages between higher education and our workforce needs.  This has been a long-standing priority of the General Assembly and it is certainly a long-standing priority of parents.

I appreciate the outstanding support and participation in Blueprint Virginia from business and community leaders across the state and look forward to presenting the final plan to our Governor-elect and elected officials at the Virginia Economic Summit on November 20.

Posted by: Paul Koonce, chief executive officer for Dominion Virginia Power and Chairman of BLUEPRINT VIRGINIA