Striving For An A+ Workforce

A revolutionary facility helps entrepreneurs educate their workers. Ultimately, programs like this one could remake the economy.

Learning

A revolutionary facility helps entrepreneurs educate their workers and transform their companies into fast-growth businesses. Ultimately it -- and programs like it -- could help remake the economy

Devin Harwell, 34, is a quiet, unassuming, seemingly dispassionate man whose voice -- both in evenness and timbre -- brings Jimmy Stewart to mind. But when he describes what an innovative education program did for his 70-employee manufacturing company, in the small Denver suburb of Henderson, Colo., Harwell gets positively fluttery. "I gotta tell you, I didn't know how I was going to continue to get people who could do what I needed them to do," he says, bouncing a little in his chair as he describes Denver Architectural Precast Inc., a company he built up and then sold last June for a sum that was considerably more than what he had paid for it in 1997. "If it hadn't been for these people, this place, we couldn't have grown as a company."

"This place" is the Higher Education and Advanced Technology (HEAT) Center, a radical project intended to transform Colorado's old-economy workers into 21st-century professionals who can fuel the state's burgeoning technology sector. More than 3,000 college students and employees of area companies are being trained in HEAT's labs and classrooms, located on the former Lowry Air Force Base, just outside Denver. But HEAT's energy is felt hundreds of miles away, even in Colorado's smallest and most remote towns. There, technical neophytes will eventually master everything from Microsoft Word to fine-instrument measurement through courses delivered over high-bandwidth lines into public buildings. That outreach gives HEAT the outsize potential to help lift Colorado's economy off the puny shoulders of ailing industries and reposition it on the strong back of the digital world.

"Fifteen years ago, Colorado's livelihood was driven by our natural-resources economy," says Governor Bill Owens. "Our fate rested on the success of mining, agriculture, and oil and gas. In the mid 1980s, those industries went through very difficult times." Agriculture lost nearly half of its 10,000 workers from 1995 to 1999. Mining, once a major industry, employed slightly fewer than 15,000 Coloradoans in 1995, and even that small pool declined to 13,100 by 1999. And while the manufacturing and construction sectors have grown, the state lacks the engineers and other skilled workers to staff them adequately. Similarly, jobs are going begging up and down the state's "convergence corridor," a string of cities along Interstate 25 that are rife with telecommunications and high-tech manufacturing companies. And those high-tech labor woes persist despite the fact that Colorado has the nation's highest concentration of technology workers: they constitute 84 out of every 1,000 private-sector employees.

HEAT is a life preserver for small-business owners who aren't even treading water in the rising technology tide.

Meanwhile, Colorado's unemployed and underemployed are moldering away in small towns that are "dying on the vine," says Rick Mann, who runs Lucent Technologies' training laboratory at HEAT. In those more remote places, most people lack the skills that would admit them to good-paying jobs. Since they also lack the means to acquire those skills, their prospects don't look bright. For those residents, HEAT may be a lifesaver: with the help of corporations and academic institutions, it is making technology training available throughout the state.

HEAT is also a life preserver for small-business owners who aren't even treading water in the rising technology tide. Consider Harwell's company, which, prior to its sale, operated for 11 years as Denver Architectural Precast Inc. The company, which Harwell refers to as Precast, made a limestone-like concrete that's used by contractors on building surfaces. Eighty percent of Harwell's 70 workers spoke little or no English; managers spoke almost no Spanish. In the past, workers followed simple manufacturing instructions printed on paper and in Spanish, but the spoken-language barrier prevented them from asking technical questions or suggesting process improvements. Product quality was iffy: Harwell's quality inspectors routinely rejected 10% of the pieces the company produced. In a record bad year, 15 workers were injured by hand tools and other equipment. And Harwell was unable to turn to the Web, whose information could have helped him make his company safer and more profitable. Precast's aging computer system could handle accounting and scheduling, but it lacked e-mail and Web-hosting capabilities and Internet access. "We just didn't have the time, the money, or the know-how to put new computers in there," he says.

In 1997, Harwell sought help from HEAT's Training Services Division, which provides the kind of IT consulting and customized training that's usually available only to big companies. HEAT helped him round up state grants with which he could invest in computer equipment and pay for education and advice from HEAT. The Center provided him with consulting services and training videos, both of which, he says, made a major difference: the company's error rates declined, and the plant became a safer place to work. In a 1999 safety ranking of 215 companies in its industry, Precast ranked 15th. The cost to Harwell? Not a dime -- thanks to the grants that HEAT helped him find. "HEAT is a great deal," he says, smiling.

As well he might. When Harwell purchased Precast, it had revenues of $2 million. With HEAT's help, he pumped up business substantially. During his three years of ownership, he nearly tripled the staff, from 25 to 70 employees, and he quadrupled revenues. When he sold Precast last June to Denver-based Rocky Mountain Prestress -- one of three suitors that courted the company -- the business was on track to take in $8.5 million. "I've already talked to HEAT about helping me on the next company I buy," says Harwell.

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