Building Hampton Roads’ Maritime Talent Pipeline with Whitney Lester

In this episode, we sit down with Whitney Lester of the Hampton Roads Workforce Council for a behind-the-scenes look at how the region is tackling one of its biggest challenges: building a sustainable skilled-trades pipeline for the maritime industry. Whitney explains how the Council—one of Virginia’s 14 workforce boards and now the largest after a regional merger—moved beyond traditional workforce services to create an employer-led, data-driven system that aligns hiring demand with training supply. From a $663K Go Virginia grant that launched dedicated talent roles, to an $11M federal Good Jobs Challenge award that helped spark the Hampton Roads Maritime Training System, the conversation covers what’s working: employer and training-provider collaboratives, removing barriers for individual trainees, expanding training capacity, and elevating “career pathways over jobs.” The result is a more coordinated regional approach—one that’s earning national attention and continuing to evolve as Hampton Roads builds what’s next together.

Visit www.maritimejobsva.com to discover what career and training opportunities are right for you in the Hampton Roads maritime industry.

The Regional Maritime Training System (RMTS) was established using a $11 million (41%) Good Jobs Challenge Grant awarded by the Economic Development Administration. It is supported by $12.1 million (46%) provided through BlueForge Alliance in partnership with the U.S. Department of the Navy, $850,000 (3%) from the U.S. Department of Labor/ETA – Community Project Funding, and $3.5 million (10%) from non-federal sources.

Transcript

So we’re talking today with Whitney Lester from the Hampton Roads Workforce Council.

This is probably going to be one of the more unique interviews we’ve done because I’m essentially interviewing our sponsor for doing this podcast. We’re doing this on your behalf. I know you came in here with some things you want to talk about—specifically what the Workforce Council has been doing, what’s been accomplished, and what’s changing.

As we were talking before we started recording, there’s a lot going on, and it continues to evolve and grow. We’re building something—and when I say “we,” it’s a huge collective “we” that this region is building together. The Hampton Roads Workforce Council finds itself at the hub of it, but there are so many spokes—and without them, it’s nothing. Collectively, we continue to build.

Continuous improvement exists all over the place, and we have visions for further growth several years out and beyond. So let’s back this up a little bit so people understand what the Workforce Council is. Why does it exist? Where did it come from? Then we’ll get around to what it’s doing today—and more importantly, what we want to be doing tomorrow.

The Hampton Roads Workforce Council is a workforce agency—a quasi-government entity. We’re one of 14 workforce boards in Virginia. We exist in some ways the same way we have since 1974. We’ve simply grown beyond the standard limits where many workforce boards exist.

Workforce boards—like many across the Commonwealth and across the country—receive money from the government (usually the Department of Labor), and we do the things workforce agencies do. We have workforce centers—ours are called Virginia Career Works—where job seekers can come in. We have business services that work with local businesses to understand their needs and marry both sides of it, while working with training and education partners as we utilize funding to defray the cost of training for both businesses and participants.

You said there are 14 across the state. Virginia is a pretty big state—it runs from the sea to the mountains—so it sounds like each workforce council is focused on developing the workforce for the particular industries in those regions.

That’s it. Historically their mission has been under the parameters of what I just described: workforce centers, working with businesses, job fairs.

I don’t mean to shortchange any other workforce board. I just happen to know the Hampton Roads Workforce Council is the largest in Virginia, in part because three—was it four—years ago, we merged Southside Hampton Roads with the Virginia Peninsula to create one very large workforce area that comprises 15 cities and counties.

We receive 25% of the state’s workforce funding now. Also, our CEO, Sean Avery, was never one to rest on good work. He has a career in workforce development and always had a notion of doing more.

That’s why in 2019, he put out a call to better understand the talent challenge—the problem businesses across the region were having finding workers. A study was conducted and funding was garnered so we could put together a division and launch into talent across the region, across industry.

With that, I came on board. I had been on the board of the Workforce Council for close to a decade, and I joined this fledgling talent division to understand the challenges businesses were facing and address them with the resources we had.

That was 2019. I came on board in September. Six months later, the pandemic hit, and I wondered: are we really going to see the talent challenge? I saw businesses shutting down. But by and large, businesses came back—and in many cases, the workers did not. The problem became exponentially more difficult.

At that time, we had to focus. You can’t solve for all industries in every part of the region. You start with the largest economic driver and the biggest pain points first: the maritime industry.

In Hampton Roads, maritime is the lifeblood—shipbuilding and ship repair. But maritime also connects to the port, offshore wind, bridge-tunnel expansion—the water touches everything we do here.

For our purposes, we focused on maritime, and within that, shipbuilding and ship repair. In 2020, I applied on behalf of the Workforce Council for a Go Virginia grant—$663,000—to put full-time, dedicated talent on this problem. It couldn’t be a pet project or committee. It needed to be someone’s job—more than one person’s job.

We were awarded the grant in full in the fall of 2020 and went to work. It was called the Targeted Talent Pipeline Project for the Maritime Industry in Hampton Roads.

We hired a team to do macro-level analysis. We needed to define and understand the problem before solving it. We hired an employer engagement director, a training provider engagement director, and a business intelligence analyst. The goal: understand the problem with real data—not just anecdotal “we need a bunch of welders.”

We adopted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Talent Pipeline Management methodology—a six-stage strategy that’s employer-led and industry-driven. It starts with identifying the problem.

Our employer engagement director, Jackie Rondo, created an employer collaborative. It began with fewer than a dozen and now includes 26 businesses—representing about 85% of shipbuilding and ship repair employment in Hampton Roads.

We built buy-in. Early on, people asked if this would be another well-intended but useless program. From the start, our mission was different: we’re no cost to employers, and we made it our job to dedicate full-time talent to this issue.

At first, there was some reticence—some of these businesses compete for contracts. But soon enough, one employer spoke up about a challenge, then others raised their hands and said, “We have that too.” It became a community within the community.

We exchange quantitative and qualitative data. We started by asking for the three hardest-to-fill positions. Three wasn’t enough—we moved to six, and now we track nine key maritime roles: welder, electrician, shipfitter, pipefitter, inside machinist, outside machinist, NDT, coatings and preservation, and sheet metal.

We ask: how many do you need now, six months from now, a year from now, and two years from now? We protect and aggregate the data and provide a regional picture of demand—our demand signal and the barometer for what the region needs.

Once we had the demand signal, the next step was understanding supply—especially training and education.

Supply comes in many forms, but the biggest avenue is training. It begins with the emerging workforce—K–12 and career and technical education centers. With so many localities, we have many school systems, and they’re not all the same. We support the ones that need boosts and learn from the ones doing it well.

After K–12, community colleges are critical. Historically, we worked closely with Tidewater, Virginia Peninsula, and Paul D. Camp, but we’ve expanded. We focus on short-tenure workforce training that gets people into jobs as soon as possible.

Private training providers in the region also do great work. The key is alignment—easier said than done.

We created a training provider collaborative, currently 36 entities, and we run similar data exchanges—aggregating what’s being trained and where.

Then we overlay supply and demand to find the gaps. Some results surprise people. Welding has seen significant investment, and the gap is narrowing. Other trades—shipfitting, pipefitting, coatings and preservation, NDT—still aren’t being trained at the needed levels.

We became the collectors and disseminators of trusted data so future investment can be targeted.

In late 2022, we received an $11 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce EDA—Good Jobs Challenge. They recognized the macro-level foundation we built and pushed us to the micro-level: boots on the ground to help solve it.

That’s where the Hampton Roads Maritime Training System began in earnest. We built on sector partnerships, and launched more recruitment and outreach to bring people into training programs.

The Workforce Council excels at case management—helping individuals navigate training aligned to their interests, skills, and geography. A person on the Peninsula shouldn’t have to travel unnecessarily if there’s training closer to home.

We also use funding to defray training costs and provide wraparound supports—especially when a full-time training program would otherwise be prohibitive. Supports can include gas cards, PPE, work boots—anything that removes barriers.

Once training is complete, we help connect people to real jobs and career pathways, using relationships within our employer collaborative. Newport News Shipbuilding is the largest participant, and at times their workforce staff have been embedded in our office to strengthen communication and alignment.

We also received additional funding from localities and the General Assembly. The momentum matters: when progress becomes visible, coordination improves, and fragmentation decreases.

Over time, we’ve built a cohesive ecosystem—HRMTS as a true system, with the Workforce Council as the hub aligning supply and demand.

One major next step came through the Navy’s Maritime Industrial Base office. We knew from the data we didn’t have enough training capacity. The industry needs thousands of skilled-trades hires annually—often 3,000–4,000, and sometimes closer to 5,000.

So capacity-building became a priority. Training helps people confirm fit and build foundational skills before stepping into the work.

On awareness, we’ve made progress. The messaging can’t be “go work in the shipyard.” People need tangible pathways, wages, benefits, culture, and a clear “career over job” narrative.

K–12 progress is real in pockets—Virginia Beach Public Schools expanded welding capacity and still has a waiting list. Community college capacity is growing significantly too: Paul D. Camp partnered with Suffolk to create a skilled trades center, and Virginia Peninsula Community College is expanding in Newport News.

By 2028, Hampton Roads expects to have doubled training capacity in key skilled trades—but instructor availability, curriculum alignment, sustainable funding, and filling seats remain challenges.

We also launched outreach that’s driving interest through MaritimeJobsVA.com—a hub for information about maritime careers, training options, and resources, including podcasts like this one that make the work real through personal stories.

Looking ahead, nothing is off the table. If momentum continues and results keep stacking up, bigger ideas become possible.

We also learn from other regions and share what’s working. There’s value in borrowing proven playbooks rather than starting from scratch.

This isn’t a “rah-rah” story. It’s hard work, buy-in, and coordination—industry, training providers, community partners, and funders moving as one.

There’s a sea of goodwill out there, and people can drown in it. Our job is to help create useful passage through it—connecting people to real training, real jobs, and real careers.

It’s been a pleasure—and there’s so much ahead that it makes my mind swim. But yes: we do see ourselves in that role.