Tuesday, Jun 19, 2007
- 12:00 AM
BY Khristopher J.
Brooks
Bristol Herald Courier
A new high-tech
company is dangling an extra 75 jobs in Russell County.
CGI Group officials
said Monday they expect to hire more workers than anticipated for a
42,000-square-foot software engineering center in Lebanon – an announcement that has
delighted local government officials.
“It’s really been
attributed to great success we’ve had in finding people in the area,” said CGI
Vice President Mark Eschle. “And the tremendous cooperation we had with the
academic community.”
CGI, a Canadian-based
information technology and business process company, opened its Lebanon facility in March 2006 after county
officials spent months luring the firm to Southwest
Virginia.
“When the original
announcement was made, it was said that they would hire 300 people within 30
months,” said Russell
County Administrator Jim
Gillespie. “And I know that, in recently talking with them, they were ahead of
their projections.”
By now, company
officials expected to have 140 people in Lebanon, but they currently have
185. In the near future, CGI’s Senior Vice President Nazzic Turner said the
company will probably hire 375 people instead of the projected 300.
CGI has about 25,000
employees stretched across the United States, Europe and Asia.
The company does software applications for a number of businesses in
telecommunications, insurance and energy as well as state and local
governments.
CGI needs to hire
more people because of a growing number of “governmental clients,” Eschle said.
Company officials
have been able to find more employees because local colleges are training
people to fill those jobs, he said. Those colleges include Southwest Virginia
and Virginia Highlands community colleges.
“And UVa-Wise and Mountain Empire
Community College are offering
training for those jobs,” said Linda Tate, executive director of Russell County’s Chamber of Commerce.
Eschle said CGI also
has hired a few employees through the Return To Roots campaign, a state program
that aims to bring back Virginia
natives to good jobs.
“So we tapped into
that area and convinced them to come home and work for us,” Eschle said. Tate
said having the skilled workers needed to fill CGI’s openings couldn’t have
come at a better time.
“There initially was
some skepticism about having enough people trained well enough and having the
credentials for those jobs,” she said. “So it has been very significant that
they’ve exceeded their expectations at this point.”
