Capitolizing on the Digital Divid

It has dynamic colleges and universities, talented minorities and a red hot high-tech environment — not to mention lots of your federal tax dollars. But can the nation's capital lead the way in bridging the digital divide?

WASHINGTON — After an economic recession and U.S. military budget reductions forced layoffs among federal defense contractors in the early 1990s, the promise of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area momentarily fell apart for Jim Golden.
An ill-fated casualty of layoffs at a suburban Maryland outfit of the old Westinghouse Corporation, Golden — then an industrial engineer — regrouped, retrained and pursued a new path into the capital city's emergent information technology industry.
"There's a world of opportunity in this area," he says.
Call it the Potomac Gold Rush, Silicon Valley East, the Netplex or the Beltway Boomtown; the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area has in recent years become one of the fastest growing high tech regions in the country.
But although Golden is positioned to prosper in a region where the demand for qualified workers outnumbers the supply, he sees too few Black and other underrepresented minority students and professionals being prepared and recruited to take advantage of the opportunities.
"In many of the jobs that I have had, I've often been the only Black person around," he laments.
Yet, the area is home to a well-established Black middle class and a plethora of colleges and universities committed to educating it. A growing Hispanic population stands to profit as well if either group can get wired to the revolution.
With a number of new initiatives on the table aimed at getting the area's minorities into the IT mix, local and national experts are watching to see if the capital city can serve as a prototype for bridging the digital divide.

Surpassing Sillicon Valley
Individuals like Golden, who are educated and skilled in IT fields are enjoying lucrative opportunities. Starting salaries for software developers, Web application developers and network administrators — indeed, high demand positions around the nation — range from $30,000 to $45,000 in the mid-Atlantic region.
Golden, who is African American and a graduate of Central State University in Ohio, is a manager at the Citigroup banking company's electronic commerce division in northern Virginia. He attributes landing his current gig to having held a succession of computer network administration jobs after leaving Westinghouse in 1991. The jobs, he says, equipped him with the experience to move into managerial ranks and to ride the wave of the region's information technology boom.
So fast has the region's information technology business grown that  IT employment surpassed that of the federal government's, traditionally the largest employer in metropolitan Washington. The number of IT workers in the region is believed to have surpassed that of the IT community in Silicon Valley in California.
As a result, local employers have so struggled to keep pace with meeting the needs of the growing information economy that an estimated 20,000 IT jobs are going unfilled. Nationwide, the IT worker shortage stood at 346,000 in late 1998. African Americans are estimated to make up six percent of the nation's IT professionals, according to a taskforce report for the National Information Technology Workforce Convocation.
"There's another dimension to the idea of ‘digital divide,' which is the issue of what we do to get more minorities into the IT worker pipeline," says Marjorie Bynum, vice-president of workforce development at the Arlington, Va.-based Information Technology Association of America.
Getting minorities into that pipeline goes back to the traditional task of expanding the pool of students with strong math and science skills necessary for any technical field.
Dr. Belle Wheelan, president of Northern Virginia Community College —  the third largest two-year school in the nation —  believes that attracting more minorities to IT fields will require an educational and marketing process that exposes young people to the industry because "no one anticipated this growth in the IT industry." 
She adds that institutions have to become more visible in low-income and minority communities to help stimulate interests.
"It's going to take some time because this field is so new to everyone," Wheelan says.