Utah County Report

We do have a long-term vision. We are working with the local universities to facilitate that partnership all the way from serving on their boards to having our employees be at the university. We just sponsored about 25 student internships at IM Flash and they were all from Utah colleges. This is really our way to bring folks in, get them experience and then hire them back into the organization.

What can we do to help recruit people from other places to come to Utah? It’s a statewide issue, but there’s a unique issue here in Utah County in particular.

WILLIAMS: We’ve got 12 interns right now from UVU. So we’ve gone back into the schools. These are bright junior and senior students that bring a fresh, new talent to our company. So we are growing our next generation of programmers from working with UVU. We’re so grateful they’re here. I don’t know what we’d do without them.

RACKER: When you’re recruiting these individuals, if they can take a look at what a great life they can have here—they can educate their kids and recreate just out of their back doors and everything else—it’s just a real compelling story for getting people from outside of the area to come in here.

GARFIELD: There is an underlying diversity here that people don’t really know about. They think that we’re all homogeneous, maybe of a predominant faith, and so it may not be attractive to some. But when you get here, you find that there is an underlying diversity. A lot of people speak a second language. Many have traveled abroad. We’re more accepting. Once people get here, they get a flavor of the village, so to speak, that they kind of want to be a part of that village.

FUGAL: This coming year, we’ll see mass transit come to this market. Our transportation infrastructure continues to be enhanced. And we haven’t seen anything yet. When you have the commuter rail linkage with Salt Lake, Davis and Weber counties—it’s almost here.

The Geneva property, if you just drive out there right now, you wouldn’t think it, but that will be the transit hub for the entire valley. And UVU is acquiring 100 acres there to accommodate their expansion, and a host of others. I would hope to see a research park potentially in a location like that.

WHITTAKER: We have a huge resource of individuals that have graduated from our local universities. They’ve been out in the world because initially that’s where they had to go to get employment, and they want to come home. As we start looking for quality employees, we need to make sure that we utilize that, that we develop a valid way of recruiting those people.