By Lisa Garcia
When Sabrina Hall was 17, she quit high school for a job in a textile factory. For 20 years she bounced from one sewing shop to another through layoffs and shutdowns as the industry was beaten up by cheaper foreign labor. Her best-paying job, for Buster Brown Apparel, vanished a few years ago when the company closed its Smyth County shop, taking 350 jobs with it. A few years ago, Hall realized she wasn’t making enough money and her chances of making more weren’t very good with job skills tied to a dying industry.

So Hall decided to go back to school under a federal retraining program designed for workers in NAFTA-affected industries. "It was a scary choice to make," she says. Questions about her ability as a student and whether she could support herself and a teen-age daughter unnerved her. After more than two years of classes at Wytheville Community College, though, Hall graduated in May 1999 from the school’s medical laboratory technology program. She studied well: In board exams to gain certification, Hall earned the highest score in the nation for that quarter. Today Hall, 42, is a medical laboratory technician for Smyth County Community Hospital in Marion. "I love my job, the pay scale is good and I’m making more now than ever before," Hall says.

Hall’s career turnaround is the kind that leaders in the Peaks of Virginia’s economic development efforts like to cite. It’s an example, they say, of the ability of workers in the region — where unemployment hovers around 6 percent — to adapt themselves to new industries as the old ones fade away. In the past four years the region has lost 2,790 jobs in the apparel industry, a trend being compounded by layoffs at area furniture manufacturing plants. Those numbers have been offset somewhat by expansions at other companies and the arrival of new companies, but the region is clearly lagging behind the rest of the state in creating jobs.

Sabrina Hall spent more than two years in school before getting a job as a hospital lab technician. Photo by Wayne Scarberry

Retooling the workforce is a cornerstone of the region’s effort to rebound. Workers here — who for generations needed little more than a high school education to get a job, often in manufacturing — today have a broad range of education options. To this end, the Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center opened at Virginia Highlands Community College in Abingdon in 1998. Geared toward adults, the center offers distance-learning courses and on-site faculty in 44 degrees, including at the master’s and PhD levels. Residents can take courses offered by once-unreachable schools such as the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Old Dominion University and Virginia Commonwealth University.

One participant is Dwayne Copenhaver, manager of continuous improvement at Bristol Compressors in Washington County, who is earning a master’s of business administration from Virginia Tech through the center. Being able to pursue a degree while still working was a factor in his decision to take his current job and his choice of where to live, he says. Earning the degree will give him some job security — and make him a better candidate to move into senior management. "The number of telephone calls from headhunters and other placement agencies [has] increased since I joined the program," he says.

At Virginia Highlands Community College, the Center for Business and Industry provides assistance, training and recruitment to encourage business growth. Training is offered on and off-site and can be tailored to a specific company’s needs. Both Virginia Highlands and Wytheville Community College in Wytheville are home to Small Business Development Centers and have degree programs in machine tool technology, which is in demand at most manufacturing companies.

Wytheville Community College also has a program called The Workforce Center, whose goal is to retrain unqualified workers in the area. The center is a response to the changes that technological advances have brought and will bring to manufacturing. Eighty percent of people who will be working in 2010 are in the workforce today, according to the center, but most lack the skills they will need for jobs a decade from now. The center provides customized training for local businesses, and assessment programs to evaluate employee skill levels and weaknesses. It also works with area high schools to keep its best students in the area with incentives such as apprenticeship programs.

Wytheville is also the site of the Manufacturing Technology Center, a consortium of five community colleges offering training and research specific to the needs of area manufacturers. The center provides technical advice about modern equipment; training both on and off-site; and aids companies with brokering resources. John "Jay" Tice, the technology center’s executive director, says the center is about direct service, but does not limit itself to that. "We offer a lot of expertise ourselves, but if we can’t meet [a company’s needs], we will find [someone] who can." Tice says a critical issue for employers is finding employees with a good work ethic and the flexibility to learn new things quickly. To help today’s employees cope with the demands of a fast-changing workplace, Tice’s technology center is developing a Workforce Development Academy for the community college system. Its main goal is to expand the workforce programs to include the rest of the college staff. "We want all the faculty to realize they impact the workforce," Tice says. "Employers are looking for flexible employees."

They are also looking for young, college-educated employees — the kind of people that urban areas have by the thousands. But this region has the same problem other rural areas have in keeping young professionals around after graduation. There aren’t enough jobs, and even for the few who find work, there isn’t much excitement after work. The rural communities are ideal for raising families or growing old, but are less enticing to the young, single and well-educated.

A new group, the Coalition for Young Professionals, is working to attract and keep the under-40 professionals in the area. Nicole Sikora, 26, and the Southwestern Virginia Technology Council’s first executive director, founded the group last December. Sikora, who lives in Abingdon, has strong feelings about her hometown. "I love this area," she says. "I lived in Atlanta and Nashville for a few years, but felt a strong pull to return. We have a lot of things other people don’t. It doesn’t take an hour fighting traffic to go everywhere. Here, people look you in the eye when you say hello instead of fearfully looking at the pavement. We have some great qualities here that people are interested in preserving. I can’t imagine being anywhere else."

Sikora’s sentiment is a reason why so many stay in the area even though they must commute long distances to get to their jobs, says Jerry Brown, executive director of the Mount Rogers/Peaks of Virginia Partnership. This "hidden workforce," Brown says, comprises about half the region’s labor pool. It’s another reason he and other economic development leaders think companies coming to the region would find an ample supply of labor. Many of these people would gladly change jobs to work closer to home, he says.

Hopefully Brown is right about that, because change is coming to Southwest Virginia one way or another. Ed Whitmore, county administrator in Smyth County, says the region’s success hinges on the ability of those workers to adapt to change. "We will have to improve our educational systems and job skills will change greatly in the next 25 years," Whitmore says. "And we will find more and more demand for people who have to continually update and change skills. It’s an exciting time, but for a lot of rural communities it’s a stressful time. It’s going to be tough." What’s exciting for economic development leaders is that for once, their region has something everybody in today’s fast-growing economy wants — workers.