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NCR’s blunt words add urgency to concerns

Local officials move to beef up efforts to combat perceived ‘brain drain.’

Staff graphic Unlike Atlanta and even nearby Columbus, Dayton loses more college graduates than it can attract to the area.

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By Jim DeBrosse, Staff Writer Updated 12:36 PM Sunday, June 7, 2009

In explaining NCR’s move to Georgia in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution earlier this week, NCR chief executive Bill Nuti cited among the Atlanta area’s attractions “the high availability of a skilled work force” and the presence of “a lot of young, educated people.”

Even more stinging was what an anonymous source in the Georgia’s governor’s office told the Atlanta Business Chronicle: “They can’t recruit talent to move to Dayton, Ohio.”

Those comments left many local business and economic development leaders fuming this week, arguing that NCR officials either failed to capitalize on the area’s assets or perhaps didn’t try to recruit here at all. “I didn’t realize for the last few years that they were in such a heavy recruiting phase,” said Deb Norris, vice president of workforce development and corporate services at Sinclair Community College.

But for some community leaders, especially younger professionals, NCR’s blunt talk added new urgency to local efforts to retain more of the young people we educate here in abundance but soon lose to other cities like Atlanta.

In 2007, Dayton lost more than 2,900 employees with college degrees ages 25 and older — the 13th worst outmigration among metropolitan regions in the nation, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution. Meanwhile, Atlanta gained nearly 12,400 college-educated workers from that age group — the second best in-migration in the nation.

Much of the brain drain here may be due to job layoffs, but at least part of the blame is the perception among young people that there’s more excitement and vibrancy to be found in bigger cities, said Sean Creighton, executive director of the Southwestern Ohio Council of Higher Education (SOCHE).

“It becomes a chicken-and-egg thing because young creative people are the ones driving the growth in the new economy,” Creighton said. “Companies want to locate where they can find that young talent.”

Despite more than 100,000 students at 20 different colleges and universities within a 60-mile radius of Dayton, the region has a hard time holding onto its own collegiate bounty, Creighton said. Unlike Atlanta and even nearby Columbus, Dayton loses more college graduates than it can attract to the area, he said.

Several nonprofit and volunteer organizations, including upDayton and DaytonCREATE, have organized in the last year to find out why younger people aren’t staying here and to make the changes that will keep them here.

UpDayton will release later this summer the results of a year-long study in which more than 500 young, creative professionals in the region were asked what they look for in a place to live and to gauge the region’s performance in meeting their needs.

Scott Murphy, project leader of upDayton, said several themes already have emerged from the study — young professionals want “a vibrant downtown, walkable communities” and a variety of entertainment and urban experiences “concentrated within a walking distance.”

But not all community leaders see a recruitment or retention problem here.

Dayton City Commission member Joey Williams, who’s also president of Chase Bank for the Dayton and Cincinnati region, agreed it can be hard at times to overcome the Rust Belt stereotypes and get potential recruits to look at the Dayton area.

But once job candidates visit here, he said, “they fall in love with it. Look at all the NCR people who have retired here over the years.”

Frank Beafore, vice president of UltraCell’s fuel cell manufacturing division in Vandalia, cited the Dayton area’s “employee-ready base in both technicians and salaried professionals” as a big reason the California high-tech company “came here and is thriving here.”

Years of layoffs in the Dayton area at LexisNexis, Reynolds and Reynolds, Delphi and other companies have created a large pool of skilled workers who simply need to be retrained. Officials say the jobs are there for those with the right skills. And they say thousands more will be created with the expansion at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base under the Air Force consolidation effort known as BRAC, local development officials say.

The Advanced Technical Intelligence Center in Beavercreek is retraining scores of recruits for an expected 5,000 new jobs for intelligence data and image analysts here in the next five years, said ATIC chief executive Hugh Bolton. “Without even advertising, we’re accommodating more (recruits) than we can handle on any given day,” he said.

And if you can’t find the highly skilled people you need, state development officials will cut red tape to create the college courses and curricula to train them, said Bill Pardue, chief executive of QBase, a data management and analysis firm launched in Beavercreek three years ago.

“We have been able to fill every single position in our company from within our community,” Pardue said. QBase now has more than 100 employees, plus 48 interns recruited from high-tech training programs developed at Clark State Community College and Central State and Wittenberg universities. Pardue said the company expects to hire half of those interns for full-time positions.

“I don’t know what NCR’s talents needs are,” Pardue said, “but our experience here has been outstanding.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2437 or jdebrosse@DaytonDailyNews.com.

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