With $40 million from the commonwealth, Northern Virginia Community College is investing in its health care and skilled trades programs with new campus buildings and faculty hiring aimed at pairing the region’s workforce needs with new labor.
These are two sectors that have grown in demand with the Covid-19 pandemic, said Steve Partridge, NOVA’s vice president of strategy, research and workforce innovation, who works with a research team at the college to analyze regional job openings and workforce data. While demand for degree programs in nursing and skilled trades have soared, the community college has had to turn interested students away because it didn’t have the building or faculty capacity.
“It’s never a good thing as an institution where you’re turning away students that want the program and that we know there’s jobs for, but we just don’t have the capability of delivering,” Partridge said in an interview.
The pandemic exacerbated the need for labor in both sectors, and neither transferred well to remote work. In Northern Virginia, Partridge said, health care workers were leaving the sector en masse due to their own health concerns and understaffing that led to burnout. And the skilled trades sector was mostly populated by older employees that were inspired by the pandemic to retire, he added.
Partridge worked with Dana Kauffman, NOVA’s director of college government affairs, to lobby Virginia’s General Assembly for financial help, which passed successfully in the state budget through its August special session and was approved shortly after by Gov. Ralph Northam.
The state budget allocated $40 million for NOVA’s two projects to cover construction, equipment and the first year of salary for faculty and staff: $25 million for a second medical campus building and $15 million for a new skilled trades center. Moving forward, funding to support staff and upgrade equipment will be included in the state budget, Kauffman said in an interview.
The expansion of NOVA’s medical education campus — which is currently one building with an attached parking garage in Springfield — includes a new 37,000-square-foot building along Springfield Center Drive. Kauffman said this could more than triple enrollment from an 80-student cohort to up to 300 students, a stark change from previous academic years when NOVA turned away up to 500 students who wanted to enroll in its nursing program.
The new skilled trades center will be built on the community college’s Manassas campus. The 24,000-square-foot building will house new programs, such as training for future electricians, HVAC technicians and auto technicians, Kauffman said.
There isn’t an estimate yet on faculty headcount for both projects, or how much hiring will be necessary to fill the expansions. But NOVA plans to work with private-sector leaders in both industries, as the college has done before, Partridge said, to help raise funding to add to faculty salaries capped by the state to make the new jobs more appealing.
NOVA is between three and four years away from launching the programs and opening the new buildings, Partridge said, and hasn't yet decided on contractors for construction. The next step is to engage in focus groups with area employers in the skilled trades sectors, as well as unions, to make sure the academic programs fit workforce needs.
“We want to make sure that there’s almost a guaranteed interview at the end of all these programs,” Partridge said. “You’ve got to make sure you really understand the needs of business and make sure that you’re not offering programs that maybe don’t have as much demand as others. We really want to be the top providers of those areas.”
Partridge said a common issue in NOVA’s applied programs — in which students enroll and go on directly to the workforce, rather than transfer to a four-year institution — is employers snatching away students before they complete their degrees.
He said NOVA wants to work with these employers to design the length of the programs so students are both completing their degrees and prepared for immediate employment, which could mean offering a variety of eight-week boot camps and two-year degree programs.