Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The Center on Rural Innovation and the Selma and Dallas County Chamber of Commerce teamed up bring community leaders together to talk about how to create a technology pipeline to connect local students with career opportunities.

Cameryn Mitchell with the center said the Selma Community Roundtable, which was held at the Selma-Dallas County Public Library on Monday morning, was designed to foster a discussion about how the area can attract technology jobs and talk about the barriers students in the education system face getting those jobs.

“Our goal today was to listen to the community and to listen to them about the kinds of opportunities they would like to see here in Selma for technology jobs,” Mitchell said.

The group featured a wide variety of community stakeholders including Dallas County School Superintendent Anthony Sampson and Selma City Schools Career-Tech director Miranda Bissoo among others. The discussion covered a number of topics from what gaps the community has in technology to barriers that students and would-be younger employees would face.

Some of the discussion also talked about how the community, local businesses and leaders can do to promote the positive aspects of the community.

Mitchell said the data they collected from this discussion and other data they’ve collected over the past few months will be used to generate a report for the city to see how they can begin to build a strategy to attract technology jobs while attracting and retaining those prospective employees to stay in Selma and Dallas County.

“We had a great discussion today,” Mitchell said.