Defense contractors need qualified workers
Increasing work from Wright-Patterson is driving demand locally.
Ever-increasing work at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is driving demand for qualified workers by area defense contractors.
Alion Science & Technology Corp., a Beavercreek-based defense contractor, has 104 job openings for work related to Wright-Patterson and is in full hiring mode.
Eric C. Wright, vice president of operations for Alion and the site lead for the company’s Beavercreek offices off Grange Hall Road, said contracts with the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, the Air Force Research
Laboratory, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center and the Air Force Institute of Technology, (among others) are driving the local growth.
“We’ve had multiple contract wins within the last year or so,” Wright said in an interview. “Customers are requiring all kinds of engineering talent.”
The company already has about 400 Beavercreek/ Wright-Patterson employees.
Wright-Patterson is the heart of much of the Air Force’s research and logistics work, focusing on both new airplanes and weapons but sustaining older planes as well.
The base is also the largest single-site employer in the state of Ohio, with about 30,000 military and civilian employees, although many of those employees have been
working remotely during the pandemic.
Alion has operations in Washington, D.C., Huntsville, Ala., Colorado, New Mexico and elsewhere.
“But by far, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and this area is the fastest growing segment of the business,” Wright said.
Alion isn’t the only Dayton-area contractor looking for good employees.
“We’re all in the same boat as far as Wright-Patterson Air Force Base goes,” Wright said. “They have a lot of demands right now because of all of the acquisition programs going on and the sustainment. There has been a lot of push in the Air Force to modernize, obviously. But they still have to sustain.”
Mainly, the company needs engineers, analysts, software writers, security specialists and others in the areas of electronic warfare, spectrum management, air worthiness and other arenas, classified and non-classified, he said.
The company needs a mix of virtual and on-site workers. Many of the jobs require workers to be on the base.
Alion is looking for a “very refined skill set” in some cases. It is relatively easy to find software and other types of engineers in the Dayton area, thanks in part to the presence of Wright State University, the University of Dayton and the University of Cincinnati, Wright said.
Finding the right people for openings in air worthiness and electronic warfare can sometimes be more challenging.
“For instance, we have a lot of work at the Air Force Institute of Technology,” he said. “In that case, we’ll look for Ph.D-level candidates that actually have some real special skill sets in statistics, acquisition and so forth.”
Alion emphasizes hiring veterans, said Wright, who is a veteran himself. But about 60% of its employees are non-veterans.
Alion completed its acquisition of Beavercreek’s MacAulay-Brown, Inc. in the summer of 2018. At the time, MacAulay-Brown had a corporate headquarters in Beavercreek and a national capital base in Vienna, Va., with 1,500 employees worldwide.
Alion is a portfolio company of Veritas Capital, a private equity firm.