Virginia Economic Review

With 30 military bases, Virginia is among the states with the highest share of active duty troops relative to state residents.

On 462 acres in Albemarle County, a plot of land along U.S. Route 29 adjacent to a federal intelligence hotspot is the latest addition to a growing cluster of industries coming to define the Charlottesville area.

Imagine an apartment building. The lobby entrance, residential door, and parking deck are all accessed and opened via a phone app. The resident takes their laptop to the pool and it automatically connects with Wi-Fi.

Ashleigh de la Torre is vice president of public policy at Amazon, where she leads the company’s transportation and sustainability initiatives, supporting its operations, logistics, and delivery businesses across land, air, and sea.

When Dutch secondary packaging solutions provider BluePrint Automation decided to open a U.S. location in 1987, the company chose a site in Chesterfield County near Richmond, due in part to the regional talent market and multiple nearby ports that could facilitate importing.

When Ryan Buzzy was a child, his passion was to take radios apart to see how they worked. At 25, he’s not a kid anymore, but his passion for seeing how things work never changed.

Foreign companies looking to invest in Virginia go through the same considerations as their domestic counterparts — site evaluation and selection, workforce availability, and logistical issues, to name a few.

According to the U.S.

The quantum age is rapidly approaching. So rapidly, in fact, that any approach to developing a workforce must account for the changes happening at the speed of light as quantum science shifts from theoretical to practical application.

Labor shortages have long been a challenge in agricultural operations, spurring innovative new ways of operating. Today’s farms rely as much on GPS-guided technology and artificial intelligence-driven automation as they do on manual labor.

Jonathan Zur is president and CEO of the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities (VCIC), a nonprofit organization based in the Richmond area that works with schools, businesses, and communities to promote inclusion.

Virginia’s higher education system, consistently ranked as one of the best in the country, is well established as an elite talent incubator. But the Commonwealth’s universities, both public and private, also serve as a launching pad for startup companies.

Educational institutions across Virginia are finding innovative ways to work with businesses to provide a pipeline of potential employees while also creating better employment outcomes for the students they serve.

Many high school students feel compelled to get a four-year college degree, even if that’s not always the best option. Students may not realize that careers in the trades are in demand and pay well.

Expertise in grapevine grafting and propagation, basic tractor repair, fermentation, and wine racking aren’t exactly skill sets that are widely found among the general population. Yet they are skills upon which the more than 800 wineries, breweries, cideries, and distilleries in Virginia depend.

As the COVID-19 pandemic raged on over the last two years, contractors became more popular as people reevaluated the spaces where they lived (and suddenly worked).

Cyberattacks that can drain bank accounts and steal personal data are high on the list of things that keep Virginia business owners and government officials up at night. A University of Maryland study found that hackers launch cyberattacks every 39 seconds. The good news?

Before opening its Westmoreland Workforce Training Center (WWTC) in 2018, Rappahannock Community College (RCC) held welding courses in the evening in borrowed space at Northern Neck Technical Center that a local high school used during the day.