By Kevin Austin

If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a thousand times. “Too many young people leave Yadkin County never to return.” It’s always the same complaint. Only the reasons cited show any variation at all.

The favorite reason people tend to give is, “we are a small, backward county with nothing to offer young people.” Well, that is a pretty broad and damning statement, but buried in it are some elements of truth including what I believe to be the real reason: a shortage of career path opportunities.

Please allow me to back up for just a second. Not all the young people leave Yadkin County. Not even all of the highly qualified young people. There are plenty of young professionals in Yadkin County, the great majority of them home grown.

But there is a problem of opportunities in Yadkin County.

Career paths are limited within our county lines. Too often, capable people get to the end of their career path with their current employer and find nothing else available within 25 miles. So they take jobs in Statesville, or Charlotte, or Winston, or Mt. Airy. Pretty soon they get tired of the commute, and they are gone - sometimes forever.

Now, consider the employer’s perspective,

No employer, no matter how good they are, how big they are, or how fast they grow, can provide career paths for everyone they hire. People develop at various rates, and when they are ready for new challenges, it is not unusual that those challenges can only be found at another employer. Most employers understand this and feel good about employees who truly wish to better themselves. New opportunities make for a happier work force. So what if your employee leaves to find new challenges elsewhere - the opening they created by leaving will give someone else room to grow.

In a perfect world (County), there would be a never-ending game of musical chairs being played (except instead of removing chairs, there would be chairs added). Each time the music stopped, everyone would land in a new position that broadened their experience and added to their skill set. Pretty soon, we would have the most valuable, most productive, and highest paid workforce anywhere.

This is where our true problem lies. It is called ‘leakage’.

Because the number of employers and jobs in Yadkin County are limited (especially compared to some of our neighboring counties), we lose some of our ‘players’. Also, because our employers train a lot of people only to have them move out of county, it becomes more difficult to add ‘chairs’ to the game. As a result, we are not only unable to retain the people we have, we are unable to attract people from other counties.

As the owner of a company who has employed probably close to five thousand people over the last 37 years, I would certainly welcome a larger shared pool of employees.

This dilemma will improve in Yadkin County. The recent developments of new products and processes at Unifi (Reprieve), the relocation of processes for Lydall, and the opening of Nonni’s in Yadkin County are all major steps in the right direction. Nothing begets success like success. Besides these huge announcements, we also have Bepco promising to grow in the old Sara Lee building, and some really interesting opportunities in Nano Technologies, food service, wineries, tourism, and hospitality.

The Town of Yadkinville and the Downtown Business Association are working to build commerce in Yadkinville and Boonville’s NC STEP program is working to build opportunities in that part of the county.

The momentum is building, and with all the other gifts that Yadkin County has to offer, we may soon have better than the ‘perfect world.’