Keeping the skilled in the city

By all accounts, Harley Etienne should not still be living in Philadelphia. Born in Boston, educated in Atlanta, he could have returned to his roots or followed his friends to live in "hip" places like New York or Washington. Instead, five years after he arrived for graduate school at Temple University, he still calls Philadelphia home. And his job at Greater Philadelphia First -- headed by 1999 Republican mayoral candidate Sam Katz -- is to encourage others to do the same. "When I moved here, I was very decided -- I'm out of here as soon as the ink is dry on my degree," said Etienne, a senior analyst of business and university relations at GPF, an association of regional chief executive officers. "People who are not from Philadelphia, who don't have family here, don't stay." What turned the tide for Etienne was a decision to take a side job while in school to get away from the books and give him a chance to meet the "real people" of Philadelphia. Today, he directs the Business/Academic Partnership for Information Technology Workforce, a program aimed at increasing the pool of IT workers by linking universities and businesses throughout the region. Their strategy is to revise the curriculum and provide greater exposure to knowledge-based companies in the area, by means such as internships. "If there's some bridge between the classroom learning experience and the internship learning experience, then we might get students to stay here -- and they'll be better trained in the end too," Etienne said. "The work will complement what's happening in the classroom." The partnership involves four area universities -- Temple, Villanova, West Chester and La Salle -- and seven technologically-dependent companies, such as Unisys, Lockheed Martin and SCT. Together, they hope to reduce the region's "brain drain." "The fact that there's not enough talent around for everybody is not only true today, but it's also projected for the future," said Michael Daves, Unisys senior consultant for global recruitment. "This is but one initiative, but it's a big one." Discussions in 1998 between GPF and these companies laid the foundation for this partnership. Besides a dearth of students in such majors as computer science and information systems, it was determined that graduates from those fields were lacking "soft skills" -- such as effective communication and team-building skills. "You're paying someone 50 to 60 thousand dollars to learn to talk to somebody else -- it's a lot easier to do that when they're a student," said Karen Hanson, GPF managing director for intellectual capital.