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Virginia’s Community Colleges are off to a promising start in their quest to triple the number of credentials students earn annually by the year 2021. As the VCCS celebrates its 50th anniversary, the 2016 class was the most successful in history, reaching record numbers for both individual graduates and credentials earned. This past spring’s graduations also represented the end of the first year of the VCCS’s six-year statewide strategic plan, Complete 2021, which established the goal of tripling credentials.

Governor Terry McAuliffe visited the Hillphoenix manufacturing facility on Ruffin Mill Road on Tuesday afternoon. McAuliffe toured the facility, which makes refrigerated grocery displays, shook hands with workers, operated a break press, and joked about his recent photo op with Willie Nelson. McAuliffe hailed the successes of the New Virginia Economy, and job training and retraining programs offered by Virginia community colleges.

The port broke its single-month record for container volume in August, making it the busiest month in its history, the Port of Virginia announced Tuesday. A total of 235,511 containers, measured in standard 20-foot units, or TEUs, moved through the port, a 7 percent increase from the same month a year ago. August marked the seventh consecutive month of container volumes of more than 210,000 TEUs.

If Virginia’s Gateway Region were receiving a performance review, its rating for the past five years would have to be “exceeds expectations.” And if that track record is any indication, Central Virginia can look forward to thousands of new jobs and close to $1 billion in investments in the next five years.

After nearly two years of work by Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis, the Greater Richmond Partnership and Virginia’s Economic Development Partnership, Virginia’s Gateway Region economic development organization, has announced their implementation of the Metro Richmond Exports Initiative. MREI is a pilot program — the first of its kind in Virginia.

Within a matter of hours, hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars in capital investment were announced in the Gateway Region as a result of two new companies finalizing their plans to build facilities to better serve their target market.

A new project aimed at increasing exports by local businesses in Richmond launched Thursday. The goal of the Metro Richmond Exports Initiative is to increase international trade activity by small and medium businesses in the area by 40 percent by 2020. The program will track its progress by monitoring the number of companies exporting for the first time and the number of existing exporters entering new foreign markets .

After nearly two years of work by Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis, the Greater Richmond Partnership, Virginia’s Gateway Region, JPMorgan Chase and the Virginia Economic Development Partnership and input from hundreds of businesses and local, state and regional officials, the long-awaited Metro Richmond Exports Initiative has been released.

Amazon recently announced significant milestones for its Career Choice program. The innovative program covers 95 percent of the cost of tuition for associates to remove the financial barrier associated with returning to school. In addition to partnering with local colleges and universities, Amazon also offers dedicated, on-site classrooms in their fulfillment centers to provide associates with convenient access to college-level coursework related to in-demand fields.