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Study: Technical concerns surround local companies BY DAVID PRESZLER From more knowledge of computer languages to better basic business skills, the training needs of Rogue Valley companies range far and wide. A study of job-skill issues for engineering, technology and information management employees found some surprisingly low-tech general needs and few new answers to meeting specific technical ones. "There's no silver bullet," says Adam Davis of Davis & Hibbitts Inc., a Portland consulting firm that did the study -- the first of its kind in Southern Oregon. The findings were presented Thursday night at the Southern Oregon Telecommunications and Technology Council's annual "Silicon Orchard Evening." The SOTTC was formed in 1997 to bring together stakeholders in the region's high-tech industries and promote their advancement here. Area employers had concerns ranging from database training that goes beyond "elementary" software like Microsoft Access to requests for classes in basic -- and what are sometimes outdated -- computer languages. "I wish the schools would produce students with Cobalt programming experience," one employer said. "Meat and potatoes Cobalt: update, transfer, skills, crossover. "What we get are all the new esoteric languages nobody in the valley uses. I don't understand it. C programming, UNIX programming and work in Cobalt are really the most needed." Such wildly different needs don't lend themselves easily to common solutions -- the kind Southern Oregon Regional Economic Development Inc., which spearheaded the $37,000 study, half-hoped it would point to. "What we found was, in a way, what we feared," says Gordon Safley, SOREDI's executive director. "All of us went into it feeling it was going to be scattered." The narrowly focused study did not attempt to address entry-level needs -- only those of engineering, technology and information managers. But Davis says most businesses interviewed raised the entry-level problem anyway. "That's very revealing," he says. "That is very much an issue to many companies." Safley says the need for a better-trained, entry-level workforce -- especially in tech industries -- was a well-known concern before the study. This study was aimed at meeting more specific needs at existing companies and addressing concerns that SOREDI has heard from businesses considering moving here. Davis contacted 80 companies in Jackson and Josephine counties -- large and small firms ranging from agricultural companies like Bear Creek to software developers and map-makers. He did in-depth interviews with 53 businesses that employ 11,138 people. Matching the regional employment shares, three-quarters of the companies were located in Jackson County, the rest in Josephine. The study found that companies are meeting their technical training needs in a variety of ways -- from in-house training to out-of-the-area instruction to traditional college courses and Internet-based classes. And the discouraging thing to those hoping for a centralized training effort here was that most companies believe their technical needs are too specific to be lumped together. That makes meeting them more complicated than adding a couple of classes at Southern Oregon University or Rogue Community College. But the overall picture offered some good news as well. Most companies were "somewhat satisfied" with their ability to meet training needs. And there is some hope of realistically addressing some of their biggest concerns. Of 35 training topic areas that included very specific technical issues, the three that companies were most interested in were more business-oriented than technical: project management, quality control and professional development. The message was that employees whose educations focused on technical know-how may not have the traditional business skills employers want. "For my company, the first priority would be leadership skills," one employer said, "because most of us are technical -- we've got that handled -- but we've never run a company before ... we've got the technical training but we've got to think quality." As far as the training goes, "The bottleneck here is availability," one employer told Davis. "And it's not that somebody has a class or doesn't have a class. "Do they (the schools) have a class at the right time? Do they have it in the evening or on the weekend? Do they have it in a format that we can take advantage of?" That portion of the study did provide Safley and other interests with a clear and practical issue. "What we may have to address is how to deliver those (classes)," he says. "The education system may have to provide that in a different manner to make it available." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA