Roanoke College and a large group of community partner organizations are launching the first Talent Summit with state and regional leaders on Thursday, March 7, in the Cregger Center.
President Frank Shushok envisioned this inaugural gathering with the goal of bringing leaders together to align the efforts of employers, higher education, governments, workforce and economic development to develop talent from within, form meaningful connections with students and attract top-tier talent to employers in the region.
"We must develop the talent right here among us and sustain the environment, community and economy that makes this region a great place to live,” said Shushok. “And we have to recruit and entice new talent. It’s not one or the other, it’s both. All evidence suggests that the communities that get this right know and embrace that it takes an organized, interconnected, community-minded village that knows instinctively that we rise and fall together.”
The Talent Summit is open to representatives from government, higher education, corporate leadership, human resources and marketing. The event will include a welcome by Shushok and a keynote from Kirk Cox, former speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates and current president of the Virginia Business Higher Education Council.
The Talent Summit will also include a panel of higher education leaders from major colleges and universities across the region. Lunch-and-learn sessions will cover topics such as employer success stories, communication best practices and building partnerships. These sessions will provide human resources, marketing and management professionals with practical knowledge that they can implement within their organizations to effect change and develop meaningful talent-attraction pipelines.
"We must develop the talent right here among us and sustain the environment, community and economy that makes this region a great place to live."
President Frank Shushok Jr.
“While the Roanoke region is ahead of many localities when it comes to talent attraction, student awareness of our region’s employers is still a big challenge for us,” said Julia Boas, director of talent strategies at the Roanoke Regional Partnership. “We don’t want to be known as a place that exports all its top talent. We want to be known as a place where you can get a world-class education, find a great paid internship, fall in love with the beauty and vibrancy of Virginia’s Blue Ridge and stay for a great job.”
Collaborative partners working to host the first annual summit include the Roanoke Regional Partnership and its talent-attraction organization, Get2KnowNoke, the Greater Roanoke Workforce Development Board, Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council, Onward NRV, Virginia Talent + Opportunity Partnership and New River/Mount Rogers Workforce Development Board, along with every major college and higher education institution in the Roanoke region and New River Valley.
Funding for the Talent Summit was provided through GO VIRGINIA (The Virginia Initiative for Growth and Opportunity).
“The Talent Summit is a great opportunity to convene leaders from all aspects of workforce, education, private sector and economic development,” said Morgan Romeo, executive director of the Greater Roanoke Workforce Development Board.
Future summits are expected to rotate locations throughout the Roanoke region and New River Valley to highlight the level of excellence at the higher education institutions in the area.
Combined, the Roanoke region and New River Valley encompass 25 institutions of higher education with a combined total of more than 100,000 undergraduate and graduate students. That’s a higher concentration of undergraduates – .108 per capita – than in the Boston-Cambridge, San Francisco-Oakland and Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill areas.
View the full agenda and event details: Future of Talent Summit 2024.