Fast-Tracking COLORADO'S High-Tech Workforce.

• Author: Bhasin, Roberta

Colorado's economic future has taken an unexpected and unprecedented new turn. Today, it's increasingly dependent on a new type of worker in very short supply -- a knowledge professional who can use head and hands in ways never before required, particularly in its vital information technology sector. Management guru Peter Drucker says it also depends on elevating the social status of blue-collar workers.

Internet-based electronic commerce, or e-commerce, has become the fastest growing factor ever seen in overall economic activity. In the process, it is turning the old blue-collar, white-collar" paradigm upside down. Skills are becoming more important for advancement than traditional college degrees, and being a multi-disciplinary technician -- or gold-collar" worker -- is becoming the fast track to success.

The new fact of life in workforce development is that between now and the year 2005, nearly 80% of new jobs will require a two-year degree or less. Further, it will take 15 such jobs to support one that requires a master's. Over the next decade in Colorado, continued economic growth will depend on being able to fill 30,000 of these new knowledge professional jobs. There will be limited opportunity for the technologically unskilled. The emerging gold-collar worker will be in the catbird seat.

It's no surprise, then, that the largest and fastest-growing segment of higher education in Colorado is the state's community college system. That's because it has long served the fastest growing segment of the educational market-the working adult, nearly 20 percent of whom already have four-year degrees. It supplies these nascent knowledge professionals with skills in key high tech areas: creating and maintaining electronic networks, systems analysis, computer engineering, database administration, programming, multimedia production, web design and user support. In addition, it teaches basic computer literacy.

The Colorado Community College and Occupational Education System, CCCOES for short, educated more than a quarter million students of all ages last year, two-thirds of whom were in career/technical programs guided by industry. Some 54,000 were in IT classes, such as Cisco Networking Academies at each of its 13 "landbased" colleges -- five in metro Denver and others in Colorado Springs, LaJunta, Lamar, Fort Morgan, Rangely, Pueblo, Sterling and Trinidad.

Cisco networking associates -- who, according to the Internet equipment giant, can earn...