Recently, Segue participated in the Technology First Job Fair at Sinclair University in Dayton, OH. The Dayton region employs more than 20,000 IT professionals, and demand for skilled workers is predicted to grow by 17 percent over the next 10 years, according to Technology First. In addition, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is the largest employer in the state of Ohio, and requires contracted IT professionals from companies like Segue to provide acquisitions, operations, maintenance, and sustainment support for their numerous systems.
The primary focus of the day was to meet and get to know potential candidates. The event drew in over 134 job seekers from various IT backgrounds. Several candidates stood out from the rest of the resumes received due to their specific qualifications and wealth of experience. At this particular event, there were an abundance of hardware and system administration and networking candidates; workers with these types of skills are valuable in the Dayton area, but the demand at Wright-Patterson AFB has diminished over the past couple years due to network operating center consolidations.
While I was at the event to represent Segue and find candidates to fill our open positions, I also used the opportunity to speak with several of the other company representatives in order to gain a better understanding of what their individual corporations did, what projects they were working on, and what they were looking for in an IT employee. This group of companies provided a great cross-section view of the work and skills that are in demand in the Dayton area. There were 11 companies in addition to Segue, to include: Crown, Hobart, New Horizons, Sogeti, Speedway, Valued Relationship Inc., Teradata, NetGain, Sinclair, Yaskawa Motoman, and Montgomery County .
One area that is often overlooked in the recruitment process is the early stages of the career lifecycle. At the Technology First Job fair, I had the chance to speak with Martha Taylor and Jessy Jones from the Internship Program at Sinclair College. While we don’t currently have internship opportunities, it got me thinking about potential places where we could use interns in the future. I also thought of the NDIA WID group and their desire to reach out to STEM schools to have an IT day or something similar in concept.
I also had an interesting and informative conversation with Paul Lamprino from the Belmont High School Workforce Incubator program. He is retired and has spent his time working to formulate a method of discovering programming talent early on in high school. He does this by having students write PC apps for their teachers. They use a tool called VIDEO_ENGLISH that he has developed for that purpose. One of the students sold an app to 30 million people. The program’s goal is to enable students to become highly paid programmers well before they finish college.
By the end of the day, we were tired but were feeling good about all the quality people that we met that might be a good fit to staff potential work in our pipeline. The last individual we spoke to mentioned that one of our clients had told him great things about Segue and how our company had left a positive impression on him. I look forward to continuing to network through Technology First and attending the job fair next year in addition to other events that this organization sponsors.