HARRISONBURG — The employee of the future is going to be a knowledge worker. That’s why Blue Ridge Community College officials say the school is developing a bioprocessing program dictated by the needs of local industries. “The finish line is no longer high school,” said John Downey, president of BRCC. “The more education you get, the better the opportunities will be. That in turn helps the community in general because we’ll have a more educated workforce.”
Plans for the bioprocessing program were unveiled Tuesday at SRI Shenandoah Valley, a division of SRI International, before about two dozen area agricultural, business, education and civic leaders.
By definition, bioprocessing is the conversion of living cells or their components to obtain a desired product. Humans have used bioprocessing for making medicine, fermenting alcoholic beverages and baking bread since prehistoric times.
Devon Genus, bioprocessing coordinator at BRCC, said it can be divided into four major areas: food processing; the manufacture of fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals; the production of recombinant protein therapeutics (biologics); and to generate renewable energy.
In the central Valley, bioprocessing primarily impacts pharmaceutical companies like Merck and food/beverage manufacturers such as MillerCoors, Sysco and Hershey, according to Genus. “Food processing is a sector that the Valley has succeeded in for a long time,” said Robin Sullenberger, director of the Shenandoah Valley Partnership, a public/private economic development group that markets the region. “[S]upporting the existing business community is just as important — if not in many ways more important — than recruiting new businesses.”
The program is expected to launch this fall with about 25 Merck employees, according to Downey. He said it will start as a noncredit program and then likely transfer to the for-credit side as demand increases and partnerships develop with other educational institutions.
To start, the program’s primary purpose is training students to be bioprocessing technicians, officials say. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects an 18 percent growth rate in the field through 2018.
Merck’s Stonewall plant near Elkton is shifting focus from organic chemical synthesis to bioprocessing and the company worked closely with BRCC to develop the new program to retrain employees.
“It’s much more of a mindset shift that we need,” said Jennifer Hepner, a chemist at the plant. “We need people to understand what aseptic processing is about … [and] a lot of the different technologies we use.” Genus, who joined BRCC in January, said the training would boost worker productivity and efficiency. “ You’ll have a technically literate workforce with an understanding of why a task is done,” he said. “We believe this will lead to reduction in employee turnover.”
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