Photo of Cynthia Lawrence

1. What was the first job you ever had and what did it teach you?

I got my first job at 16 with John Norman Clothiers. It was a men’s store in Roanoke that had added a women’s department, and I worked after school and on Saturdays. It taught me a lot of customer service skills, including how to listen to people’s needs and how to come up with solutions. I also learned what hard work retail is. Long hours, on your feet, and always presenting with a smile and a sense of gracious hospitality.

2. What made you want to be an entrepreneur?

From an early age, I had an interest in creating something and selling it to the public, which I think is what drove my after-school job at John Norman. My father is a certified public accountant, and we’d always had a business environment in our home. He encouraged my business interest, and when we started the company, he was right there every step of the way. I enjoyed creating the organization, listening to clients’ needs, and coming up with solutions. I learned how to lead a team and how to collaborate with others to deliver our products and ensure our customers would be satisfied.

3. What advice would you give to someone who wanted to start their own business?

Having a good finance team around you is very important. You should have a finance partner who understands the dynamic of cash management and can plan for the long term. Having someone who can read the market to help you make decisions in a timely fashion is essential.

4. What is your favorite part of your job at Carilion Clinic?

My favorite part of this job is that I get to help develop a new business model for how the health workforce of the future is developed by working internally across the organization and externally with all of our community partners. All of my love for our region and everything I learned from running a small business for over 30 years has been brought together with what I’m doing now for Carilion. I absolutely love everything I’m doing.

5. Can you talk about the inspiration behind your GO Virginia project?

After I sold my business in 2015, I was fortunate enough to work with Carilion Clinic as the VTC Partnership Director. My job was to work within each of the organizations to find points of common interest that might serve as collaborations to drive the partnership’s success. Throughout this process, it became quickly apparent we were not going to have enough qualified health and life sciences workers to meet the needs of the growing Virginia Tech Carilion enterprise. We knew from industry research we were going to come up against a healthcare worker shortage around 2020. These conversations that I was having in 2017 and early 2018 led us to pull together educators and employers into a conversation about the workforce. When the pandemic hit, we formalized the work in a more urgent fashion and started to bring the stakeholders together to look at how we could align health sciences education for youth and adults so we could place individuals in health sciences jobs more quickly to meet the immediate need.

6. The project aims to establish a new model for wide-spread business-education collaboration. What does this model look like?

We organized the effort using an employer-led collective impact model. In that structure we have an executive committee, a finance subcommittee, and five task forces that look at certain areas of need. Educators are able to be at the same table as employers, K-12 school systems, community colleges, and four-year universities. Student voices are also integrated in some of these task forces. The purpose of gathering these people at the foundational level is so employers get involved in the students’ educational process earlier. This will allow employers to inform curriculum so it’s relevant and current. Not only do we want employers to be able to assist with curriculum design, but we also want them to get to know the students at a young age. Employers can develop mentorships and job shadowing opportunities and can talk to young people about their interests, getting them excited about their future. Also, if employers are involved in the educational process, adult learners can become skilled very quickly and be more effective when they move into roles they have recently been trained for. We are also educating the educator. We want to create opportunities for instructors in the health and life sciences to shadow and learn in an employer environment so they can take firsthand knowledge into the classroom. For a host of factors, there is a nation-wide instructor shortage so rather than employers and academic institutions competing for instructors, we are exploring a shared appointment model, where practicing clinicians are allowed time by employers to teach in an academic setting. We’ve had some collaborative solutions already enacted and implemented by some of the school districts and community colleges to help with stackable degrees and transfer credits. One of the task forces is charged with putting together a campaign to encourage folks who might not have considered the health and life sciences to look into it, because the field is broad and varied. For example, if you’re a robotics engineer and you’re interested in drones, that field is applicable to the health and life sciences. We need all kinds of thinkers involved for the workforce of the future.

7. What are your future plans for the project?

In the future, we want to focus on tightening the collaboration between employers and educators. Our immediate next step is to more actively involve our economic development professionals so that we are working collaboratively, not only in the region, but throughout the Commonwealth. We want what we’re doing here to be complementary to and supportive of other regions’ growth and investment in workforce development initiatives.

8. What do you enjoy most about being a GO Virginia grantee?

The advice, the support, and the mentorship that the GO Virginia Region 2 Council and the administrators of the funds at Virginia Tech provide. Everyone has been so supportive of what we’re trying to accomplish. It really feels like we’re all working together to make our region a better place, and the Commonwealth a better place. I’m very grateful for the level of collaboration we receive from the Council.

9. What activities or hobbies do you like to do in your spare time?

I enjoy music, and I sing and am part of a choir. I also enjoy reading. I like biographies and historical fiction. And a good whodunit from time to time. I also exercise and love tennis.

10. What’s your favorite place to go on vacation?

I have two favorite places. I love big cities for short periods of time, to go see plays and hear some music, but my favorite place to go to relax is the beach.