The Boeing Co. is partnering with the commonwealth of Virginia to set up a new workforce development and education hub for veterans and their families at Virginia Tech’s campus in Potomac Yard, the company announced Monday.
Boeing (NYSE: BA), which just last month made public its plans to move its global corporate headquarters from Chicago to Arlington, is digging deeper into the area with the new Boeing Center for Veteran Transition & Military Families.
In May 2021, the aerospace giant announced a $50 million investment in Virginia Tech’s tech-centric Alexandria graduate campus, where the first academic building is now under construction. The new center will use some of those dollars, with the remainder slated for student scholarships, recruiting faculty and researchers and supporting STEM initiatives for local K-12 students. Spokespeople for Boeing and Virginia Tech declined to say how much of the company's investment will fund the new center.
“This initiative will unlock new career opportunities for veterans and their families and help develop leading technical talent while affirming our continued investment in Northern Virginia,” Boeing president and CEO Dave Calhoun said in a statement.
The new center will be located in that first building, scheduled to open in 2024, said Lance Collins, vice president and executive director of Virginia Tech's innovation campus. It will provide career resources and job opportunities for veterans and support their families during the transition to civilian life, operating in concert with the university’s services center, called the Hokie One Stop, on the second floor, Collins said in an interview.
"This will be programming that's really focused on helping veterans to get into a really hot area," he said. "This area of technology is exploding, and this is a well-trained group of people that really could contribute and honestly address what is a fairly substantial gap in terms of talent."
In addition to housing the new veterans center, the 11-story, 300,000-square-foot building will house graduate programs for computer science and computer engineering. It will be located at 3575 Potomac Ave., at the southwest corner of the 3.5-acre campus near the new Potomac Yard Metro station.
The university will work with Boeing and the state to staff the center, though the number of employees and the center's capacity for veterans aren't yet finalized, Collins said. Also to be determined, the exact square footage of the center itself.
Virginia Tech has started reaching out to veterans and their families, as well as individuals in the military who are looking to soon transition to civilian life, to recruit them to the planned jobs center, Collins said. The commonwealth is contributing financially to establish the center, as well; Collins said he didn't know how much, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin didn't disclose the amount during his speech at Boeing's press conference on Monday morning.
Boeing hosted the press conference at its Northern Virginia office-turned-headquarters at 929 Long Bridge Drive in Crystal City. Other speakers included Virginia Tech president Tim Sands and U.S. Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner.
Youngkin was a member of the Virginia Tech advisory board that developed the Potomac Yard graduate campus concept years before he was elected as governor, Sands said during the press conference.
Virginia Tech announced its $1 billion Potomac Yard campus in 2018 on the same day Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) publicly selected Arlington for its second headquarters. Sparked by Amazon's initial HQ2 search, the goal of the campus is to develop talent to feed a growing Northern Virginia tech ecosystem.
The campus, backed financially by the state, is expected to enroll 750 master’s students and 200 doctoral students in cybersecurity, quantum information science and technology, and artificial intelligence by 2028. Just shy of 200 students were enrolled as of last fall, though those students are taking classes at Virginia Tech's Falls Church operation.
JBG Smith Properties (NYSE: JBGS), Baltimore-based contractor Whiting-Turner and Detroit-based architecture firm SmithGroup lead the campus development team.