UR among regional consortium members receiving NSF grant funds to study improving digital technology education

The University of Richmond is among a consortium of large employers and leading higher education institutions in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia region (DMV) to receive a $1M grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to research and plan digital technology upskilling/reskilling efforts in the region.

As a member of the Consortium and sub-awardee of the NFS grant, the University of Richmond will receive $40,000 to study how to improve workforce credentialing at the university. Dr. Lionel Mew, Information Systems program chair, is the principal investigator for the university’s sub-award. Dr. Laura Poe will work on the effort to determine how best to meet the digital technology upskilling and reskilling needs of students from all five schools of the university, along with the local workforce. The study will also propose an implementation plan.

The Consortium brings together over two dozen university, business and nonprofit partners in the DMV to align their efforts on upskilling and reskilling employees to gain digital technology skills in areas including data analytics, cybersecurity, cloud computing, networking/IT and artificial intelligence/machine learning.

The Consortium is made up of three intermediary organizations: The Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF), the Greater Washington Partnership, and the Business Roundtable. These intermediary organizations seek to align the efforts of regional stakeholder groups in order to increase the number of high-quality, transparent pathways to gain digital technology skills that are valued by employers.

Consortium members touch nearly 250,000 students and 180,000 professionals in the region. The Consortium’s alignment efforts will increase the number of workers with digital technology skills and make a significant impact on the DMV’s STEM workforce.