Building Connections, Building Workforce; a Discussion of an ARC POWER Grant

In West Virginia, the unemployment rate is 3.6% (2024) and the workforce participation rate is 55.1% (2024) suggesting 44.9% of work-eligible people are not participating in the workforce while another 3.6% are looking for work. We have identified attracting and retaining job-ready employees, inadequate communication and collaboration, and misperceptions among students and job seekers concerning the diverse career opportunities available in WV as challenges within the region. The ARC POWER grant project, “Building Connections to Grow Capacity: Breaking Down Regional Barriers in the STEM Workforce Pipeline” addresses these challenges and have proposed many opportunities to overcome these barriers making a connection between industry, academics and educators, students and other jobseekers, and workforce entities to develop the STEM workforce in the service region of Fairmont State University (FSU) and Glenville State University (GSU) through a Regional Career Services and Workforce Development Collaborative. Several areas of the grant are likely of interest to educators in academia, including an emphasis on forming industry advisory boards to help build stronger relationships between academia and industry and also aid in refining curriculum and a focus on both student and industry engagement and instructor and industry engagement to create opportunities for job shadowing, internships and other opportunities between these groups. This grant provides resources for fostering collaboration among people who might not normally interact, and this collaboration can produce an enormous impact on the STEM workforce in our region.