Over 200 Knoxville businesspeople, area educators, parents, students, and others attended the Workforce Development and Education Summit follow-up meeting sponsored by EdAmerica and South College. Knoxville Chamber Workforce Development and Education Manager Ahnna Estes helped organize the event, hosted by Innovation Valley, Inc. at Cokesbury United Methodist Center, designed to create action plans that will solve issues identified during March’s summit.

Knoxville, TN (Thursday, June 5, 2008) – Today, Knoxville Chamber member Food City announced that customers will soon see the return of Lay’s Meats, an all-time regional favorite to the shelves of their retail supermarkets.

Innovation Valley Inc. will host a follow-up meeting to the March Workforce Development and education Summit, on Tuesday June 10th at the Cokesbury United Methodist Center. This meeting will provide a forum for the community to discuss and adopt action plans to address the challenges that were identified at the March Summit. To register or for more information please contact Ahnna Estes, 865-246-2658.

Pedestrians need to always remember to look both ways before they cross the street – but it’s particularly important to remember that rule in downtown Knoxville this week. Beginning after the morning rush hour on Tuesday, June 3, the new street circulation pattern near Market Square goes into effect.

Ambassadors of the Chamber ensure member satisfaction and retention. They also help staff events and act as mentors for new members. This month, Commerce spoke with the ambassador chairs, Jana Davison and Jennifer Morris.

Tennessee State Representative Harry Tindell provided Chamber members a blunt, straightforward review of the state budget during April’s legislative briefing. The event was the third in a series sponsored by AT&T in which Chamber members are updated on the ongoing Tennessee legislative session.
As chairman of the House Budget Subcommittee, Tindell detailed a bleak situation.

The East Tennessee Television and Film Commission’s tradeshow on April 29th was a tremendous success. Nearly 500 people attended the event held at downtown Knoxville’s Crowne Plaza.

“Many of the vendors came to us and asked, ‘When is your next trade show?’” says ETTFC Director Michael Barnes. “That tells that the people who attended the event were very pleased with what they saw.”

Online shopping isn’t the wave of the future; it’s many buyers’ choice for purchasing today.

“It’s an Internet world,” says Karen Finney, Carolina Pottery manager. “Everyone does more and more shopping online and we’re excited the Chamber offers a link from its Shop-Dine-Stay website to our website.”

Finney is excited because the company’s website received the most page impressions (“search” hits) in the first quarter of 2008 from Shop-Dine-Stay. The Chamber’s shopdinestayknoxville.com site came online in late 2006 with traffic to the site continually multiplying.

Whether for stopping cars or bullets, titanium is the material of choice, but it has always been too expensive for all but the most specialized applications. That could change, however, with a non-melt consolidation process being developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and industry partners. The new processing technique could reduce the amount of energy required and the cost to make titanium parts from powders by up to 50 percent, making it feasible to use titanium alloys for brake rotors, artificial joint replacements and, of significant interest now, armor for military vehicles.

The spring Workforce and Education Summit dealt with education in broad terms and participants discussed what was necessary for students to successfully complete their education and be functioning members of the workforce.

On June 10, the Chamber will hold a follow-up meeting at Cokesbury United Methodist Center so that the community can share ideas and action items that will positively benefit the local education system and workforce development initiatives.