Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina

5 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 3, ISSUE 10 which continue to graduate tens of thousands of students every year into the North Carolina talent pool. Another feeder is the 58, two-year community colleges that we have across the state. They are very good at adapting curriculum quickly to produce the type of skills and educational attainment that our rapidly growing industries are looking for. “We also have a number of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, like North Carolina A & T– which is the largest HBCU in the country and one of the largest producers of engineering talent. As more companies recognize the value of having a diverse workforce, I think being able to partner with HBCUs for talent needs is something unique that we can be talking about. “In addition, we have retiring or exiting military personnel. There are about 120,000 active duty military at any given moment at the various bases here. Every year, around 18 thousand of those individuals are leaving military service and we hope that many of them choose to remain “So I think we’re fortunate to be where we are but there’s still a lot of work to be done. Tourism for example is not up to where it was pre-pandemic, so there’s still room for improvement in that sector. But if you look at the manufacturing sector, it’s been announcement after positive announcement in terms of companies choosing to put production, manufacturing, and other industrial investments here in the state.” BVM: How is the EDPNC addressing the issue of workforce availability? Chung: “ We deal with workforce every day at EDPNC, when we talk to existing companies about their pain points, as well as when we’re courting companies to come to North Carolina. One of their first concerns is how can we assure them that North Carolina has the workforce they need. We explain to them that we have some really good feeders into the talent pool that they have to draw from. It starts with a number of world renowned four-year universities,