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,…
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