Va. looks to produce more ‘middle-skilled’ workers

When Tennessee-based Microporous officials visited Virginia in 2022 to scout locations for a new plant, Danville leaders took them to local public schools.

That might seem like an unusual field trip, but choosing the right site for a manufacturing operation is not as simple as picking a plot of land anymore, says Julie Brown, vice president of advanced learning at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research, a Danville-based economic development and training organization. Increasingly, companies are asking economic developers where their future workforce will come from.

“We take them and show them 11-year-olds that are getting on virtual welding machines, that know how to run a [computer numerical control] milling machine, that are designing their own. … It could be a Christmas ornament, it could be a bridge, it could be whatever structure, and building that through additive manufacturing,” Brown says.

Maybe it wasn’t just the 11-year-olds they saw, but Microporous’ visit paid off for Danville and Pittsylvania County, which co-own the Southern Virginia Megasite at Berry Hill.

In November 2024, the battery separator manufacturer announced that it had picked the megasite to build its $1.4 billion plant, which is expected to begin operating in late 2026, promising more than 2,000 jobs.

Many of those jobs will be in the “middle-skilled” arena, or jobs in machining, electrical, computer automation and other fields that require training beyond a high school education but not beyond an associate’s degree.

“It goes beyond just running the equipment,” says Brad Reed, Microporous’ vice president of corporate development. “These are people that have to maintain it and keep it running. … We’re going to need a lot of those highly skilled people.”

The two finalists were Berry Hill and the Triangle Innovation Point, a 2,150-acre industrial park near Sanford, North Carolina, southwest of Raleigh. What tipped the scale for the commonwealth is the workforce development pipeline that Virginia already has in place, from those students the company witnessed in local public schools to other incentives meant to help recruit and train employees, Reed says.

“They’ve been planning on enough manufacturing capabilities with over a 2,000-acre site,” Reed says of the Berry Hill site, “and they’ve been thinking ahead.”

There were 2.4 million middle-skills jobs in the state in 2016, a number that is expected to increase to 2.6 million by 2026, according to the Virginia Employment Commission. Those jobs run the gamut from skilled trades like welding, plumbing and HVAC to roles in manufacturing, health care, IT, energy and commercial truck driving.

“These are critical jobs,” says Todd Oldham, research director of the Virginia Office of Education Economics, part of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership. “These jobs are what makes society work.”

According to the National Skills Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates for access to high-skills training, 52% of jobs require skills training past high school but not a four-year college degree, based on 2018 data. In Virginia, 49% of jobs required skills training beyond high school, but only 41% of workers could access the training required to be hired into those jobs, NSC says.

A 2024 study by Georgetown University, titled “The Great Misalignment,” goes a step further. With the national economy projected to add an average 18.5 million jobs annually through 2031, 5.8 million of those jobs, a little more than 31%, will be in a middle-skilled role. But in half of the United States’ 564 labor markets, at least 50% of those middle-skilled credentials will need to be granted in different fields to fill the gap between credential supply and projected labor demand, the report says.

And while Virginia reaps praise for its educational opportunities and currently ranks as CNBC’s Top State for Business, the commonwealth has room for improvement, Georgetown says. The state needs to rebalance how it is preparing its skilled workforce so employers have trained people to hire, or local economies may suffer.

“What we, I think, need in Virginia, is more investment … particularly in our career and technical areas, right? Because that’s the area that we most need to grow,” says Virginia Community College System Chancellor David Doré.

Thinking ahead

Georgetown’s study is broken into commuting zones, and an online interactive map hints at the extent of credential and job misalignment by region, as well as by industry sector. The state’s “Golden Crescent,” which stretches from Northern Virginia and Richmond through Hampton Roads, saw middle-of-the-road misalignment, with Northern Virginia’s counties around 56.5%, the Richmond region around 55% and Hampton Roads with 46.3%, ranking it among the better aligned areas of the state.

In Southern and Southwest Virginia, misalignment ranges between the 40s and the 70s, with Danville and Pittsylvania faring well at 41.4%.

The Georgetown report isn’t a perfect snapshot; it doesn’t include noncredit certificates in its findings, and it doesn’t offer specific reasons for Virginia’s alignment gaps. Urban areas appear to be better aligned in part because of industry competition and more educational opportunities than in rural areas.

And while differences in local and regional economies may offer some clues, some data points are universal. Blue-collar skilled workers are desperately needed in every region of the state.

Also, some Virginia community college students are earning degrees that don’t directly match an occupation but are primarily pathways for students to transfer to a four-year college or university to earn a bachelor’s degree.

“Even for these students that want to transfer, economies really would benefit if those students had credentials that align to skills,” says Laura Ullrich, a regional economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, who also directs the bank’s community college initiative. Ullrich has been using her report in public presentations throughout the region.

Better educating students — and parents — about the value of different degrees and credentials, and about what a particular career itself might entail, are some of the challenges Doré is trying to tackle. He took over leadership of the state’s 23 community colleges in April 2023 with realigning the system to match industry needs in mind.

“What I like to say to students is, ‘Pursue your dream,’” Doré says. “And pursue what you’re really passionate about, but in the midst of that, also make sure that you are pursuing something practical, so that if you don’t continue on in that area, that you will have some marketable skill.”

VCCS’s strategic plan, Accelerate Opportunity, which went into effect in July 2024, is meant to help address alignment problems. The plan set a goal of producing 300,000 credentials, including degrees, diplomas, certificates and Fast Forward graduates, by 2030.

To help spur that forward, VCCS has held summits to bring together business, economic development and community college leaders with the intent of increasing coordination to put more Virginians to work. So far, the summits have focused on health care and skilled trades, with another planned for cyber and IT. VCCS has also been partnering more closely with the Virginia Department of Education to collaborate around building career pathways to expose students to and build awareness around skilled trades in their formative years, Doré says.

Meeting middle-skilled workforce needs comes with a large investment. VCCS has broken down education and workforce needs by each of the state’s nine GO Virginia regions.

An economic development initiative launched in 2016, GO Virginia has requested $138 million in state funding to add credentials in high-priority areas like health care, skilled trades, manufacturing, IT and transportation. About $90 million would go toward capital improvements and equipment to support the community college system’s training capacity, leading to more than 13,000 trained and credentialed workers by 2031, VCCS says.

“You’ve got a bottleneck around welding. You need more welding labs and booths. Mechatronics and advanced manufacturing and robotics, you’re just going to need a lot more equipment, right, to service those students, and those are high-cost programs to invest in,” Doré says. “So, we do need additional investments from the state to really scale a lot of these programs.”

Virginia Works, a new state agency launched in 2024 to coordinate workforce efforts across the state, is also helping to link workers with employers and training that can lead to a valuable credential through 25 workforce centers throughout the state. The agency has a goal to boost the number of registered apprenticeships, a federal program that leads to a nationally recognized industry credential, to 20,000 in Virginia by the end of 2025, up from about 15,000 now.

Virginia Works relies on high-demand occupational data developed by Oldham’s office to identify fields to focus on, says agency Commissioner Nicole Overley. While apprenticeships have traditionally been in more of the skilled trades, emerging areas include health care, education, IT, data science and cybersecurity, Overley says.

Key partnerships

Employers are already taking advantage of programs and state incentives to build pipelines for and recruit in-demand skilled workers. That involves not only leveraging the community college system but also programs within the state’s public middle and high schools, including career and technical education programs that reach 6th through 12th graders, dual-enrollment programs that allow high schoolers to work toward a skilled trade certification and through Great Opportunities in Technology and Engineering Careers, or GOTEC, an IALR-managed program that gives middle schoolers hands-on learning in critical engineering and technology jobs.

Amazon Web Services in 2023 announced a $35 billion investment to build and support data centers in the state, which are largely clustered in Northern Virginia but spreading to Central Virginia. Georgetown’s data shows the region’s

STEM jobs and workers are aligned, but  it is in desperate need for workers who will build, connect and help maintain data centers. Finding those plumbers, HVAC technicians, pipefitters, fiber optic fusion splicers and other skilled tradespeople, particularly while facing demand from other companies for those workers, “is a major challenge, and it’s a business imperative,” says Nicholas Lee-Romagnolo, AWS’ principal for economic and workforce development.

Amazon’s cloud business has more than 30 education and training programs in Virginia, including partnerships with VCCS and in-house trainings to build skilled tech workers.

With growing demand across the state in energy generation, including in electric distribution, nuclear, solar and offshore wind, Dominion Energy will also need to hire for a variety of skilled labor jobs that span multiple sectors. The Richmond-based Fortune 500 utility has a history of supporting skilled trades pipelines, including state legislation passed in 2019 to add energy to career clusters offered in tech schools for students in grades 6 through 12. Dominion also participates in Mission Tomorrow, a ChamberRVA program that exposes thousands of eighth-graders throughout the region to a variety of careers.

Partnering with schools and communities not only helps build the skilled workforce pipelines Dominion will need in the future, but it’s a good business practice, company officials say.

“In order to be able to provide sound economic development, we need to be able to help our communities upskill and recognize where and how they can pursue meaningful careers,” says Matt Kellam, Dominion’s manager of workforce development and planning.

One powerful tool in the state’s arsenal for attracting businesses, the Virginia Talent Accelerator Program, also helps companies recruit and build their workforces at no cost for the first year of training. Launched in 2019 as a partnership between VEDP and VCCS, the program has contributed to 60 project wins and more than 16,000 new jobs, says Mike Grundmann, VTAP’s senior vice president.

While Microporous is busy building its plant in Danville, VTAP is already at work, having launched a website listing job openings, as well as information on how to qualify for one of 249 maintenance operator roles that will be filled. At the start of the year, nearly 100 people had expressed interest, Grundmann says.

The talent accelerator also contributed to Civica Rx’s decision to build its $124.5 million drug manufacturing facility in Petersburg. There wasn’t a ready-made workforce to fill pharmaceutical jobs, but Brightpoint Community College in Chesterfield County has a two-semester credential program that lands graduates a guaranteed job interview with Civica, says Kris Weidling, the company’s chief human resources officer. Thirteen people have been hired from the program so far, he says. “We celebrate each time we get one.”