An aerospace professional development center will open at Wright State University to fill the gap of employers searching for hard-to-find qualified employees in an industry losing large chucks of its workforce to retirements, officials said.

The center will open at the Wright State Research Institute this month, said state Sen. Chris Widener, R-Springfield.

“It’s going to be a pretty robust, dynamic center,” he said. “We felt like employers tell us we have jobs, but we can’t find the people properly trained and qualified.”

Wright State will work with aerospace and defense contractors and the government on the initiative. A formal announcement is expected today.

Widener said despite fears of automatic, across-the-board defense cuts next January, certain kinds of work will continue to be a priority in military aerospace. Ohio Aerospace Industry President Michael L. Heil said commercial aviation, meanwhile, faces “explosive growth.”

The aerospace industry faces potential employer shortages as baby boomers become eligible for retirement and fewer younger workers enter the field. More than half the employees at the top 20 aerospace firms are eligible to retire by 2016, said Susan Lavrakis, Aerospace Industries Association workforce director in Arlington, Va.

“That’s an awful lot of expertise to replace in any time frame,” said Dan Stohr, an AIA spokesman.

Ohio had 15,992 workers in the aerospace industry in March with an average weekly wage of $1,796, according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, however, the state’s largest single site employer had just over 29,000 employees at the end of 2011.

Aerospace jobs often require a science, technology, engineering or math background and the ability to get a U.S. security clearance to work on national security-related programs. In the Dayton region, there’s a shortage of systems, radio frequency and software engineers and cyber-security experts, but it has a “fairly healthy” supply of workers in the sensors, advanced materials and manufacturing sectors, said Kerry D. Taylor, director of the Ohio Aerospace Hub of Innovation & Opportunity. The new center could help bridge the skills gap in aerospace, he said.

Finding qualified blue and white collar workers is a common refrain among aerospace employers, Heil said.

“We need to hire several people that just aren’t available in this area,” said Roy E. Anderson, president and chief executive officer of Defense Research Associates Inc. of Beavercreek. The defense firm needs system engineers to work on sense and avoidance technology for unmanned aerial vehicles. “Basically, the person you’re looking for is working for somebody else so it’s an objective of hiring he or she away.”

Modern Technologies Solutions Inc. has had difficulties finding the right expertise on the job, too, said G. Scott Coale, director of Dayton operations and former vice commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory.

“We’ve gone months before we’ve filled some vacancies,” he said.

Jennifer Villarreal, a GE Aviation spokeswoman, said the company has reached out to universities and community colleges and had job fairs to find experienced engineers and technicians in the Dayton region. “We do have challenges hiring experienced engineers,” she said.

The Air Force faces the same dilemma with more than 40 percent of its workforce over the age of 50, one scientist said.

“One of the biggest issues we spend time in my office worrying about is making sure we have a sufficient pipeline of scientists and engineers” coming into the Air Force, said Morley Stone, a chief scientist at the 711th Human Performance Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. “… We’re worried about having a supply versus demand problem.”

The Air Force Research Laboratory, which has half its directorates at Wright-Patterson, has more than 6,500 scientists and engineers around the world.

An Aviation Week workforce study released this year expected aerospace employment to drop below 600,000 workers by the end of the year because of attrition or retirements of 56,000 employees, but companies still planned to hire 28,000 workers.

To bring more workers into the field, the Aerospace Industries Association has gone so far as to work with entertainment industry officials, among a host of other organizations nationwide, to change the image of science and engineering to youth, Lavrakis said.

“It’s a huge cultural and social issue,” she said. “For many years, these fields have been represented in the media and popular culture as not cool, not interesting.”

The cost of the Wright State center wasn’t immediately available, but the funds are derived from state casino license fees which can only be spent on job training, and workforce and economic development, Widener said.

The state has committed $21.4 million of those funds on a wide range of aerospace-related initiatives, he said.

The announcement builds on Wright State’s efforts to align academic programs with the needs of the aerospace and defense industries. In July 2011, the university took the lead in an $11.4 million effort with Ohio’s public colleges and universities to create curriculum targeting careers in the industries through its Defense Aerospace Graduate Studies Institute. The university and local business partners said the grant would lead to the creation of 250 jobs, according to Wright State.

Wright State also houses two Ohio Centers of Excellence in Advanced Transportation and Aerospace to create new wings, fuselages and tails for future fighter aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles, and create a vehicle modeled after a flying insect to help the military spy on enemies in urban areas, according to the Ohio Board of Regents.

Staff writer Meagan Pant contributed to this story.