The new chief technology officer of Boeing Co.'s worldwide operations flew into Charleston a few days ago for a review of where the region's innovation economy is heading.

Over a nice meal, Greg Hyslop absorbed a polite earful, ranging from talk about a "talent shortage" in the local digital world to an urgent need to dig deeper on the workforce development front.

His visit to Boeing's East Coast aircraft-assembly and research outpost was set up by the company in concert with The Atlantic, a 159-year-old magazine that covers politics, business, technology and other public affairs. The purpose was to measure "the strengths and weakness of Charleston as more cities around the nation compete for talent and investment," said Steve Clemons, editor-at-large of the Washington, D.C.-based publication.

The free-flowing 90-minute "conversation" took place in a private dining room at a downtown restaurant Wednesday night. The guest list included 17 mostly local residents representing an assortment of industries and interests, from businesses large and small to economic development and the arts.

For the most part, the table talk focused primarily on the challenges of filling the jobs of the future, as well as the here and now.

Mary Thornley, the longtime president of Trident Technical College, set the tone. She said educators and employers must do more to recognize and capitalize on the potential of "the 40 percent" –- those middle of-the-road kids who tend to get ignored and brushed aside, who fall between the top of the class and the bottom of the barrel.

Dot Scott, president of the NAACP Charleston Branch, agreed. "We don't have any kids to lose anymore," she said.

Thornley reminded that Charleston is "not a sleepy Southern town" anymore. Nor is it just "a pretty place to visit." The region has blossomed rather quickly into a globally recognized advanced manufacturing hub that's lured big-ticket investments from the likes of Boeing, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz, she said.

Hitting home

Her observation about society's propensity to focus on the top achievers hit home with one of the hosts. Joan Robinson-Berry is a Boeing veteran executive who was named vice president and general manager of the company's nearly 8,100-worker North Charleston operation this year.

"I was in the 40 percent," she said Wednesday. It's easy to see why. Robinson-Berry, an African American, grew up in a household of nine children in an impoverished area of east Los Angeles County.

"It was a very, very poor neighborhood," she said.

Still, she managed to defy the odds. She set her sights on a career as an aerospace engineer, becoming one of the first women in her community to earn an advanced technical college degree.

Similarly, it will require "out-of-box thinking" to identify, train and nurture the kind of skilled workers that the Charleston region needs now and will continue to need, Robinson-Berry said.

"Our global competitors have figured it out. ... We're going to do our part, definitely, to tap into that 40 percent," she said of Boeing South CarIt's not just the mega-manufacturers that are looking for ways to harness the overlooked or undertrained. Some of the region's smaller, entrepreneurial technology firms are having a tough time finding qualified entry-level workers who can "hit the ground running," said Christina Lock, who left software developer SPARC last year to form Catch Talent on Daniel Island.

"There is a talent shortage no matter how you cut it, slice it," said Lock, a self-described "advocate" for apprenticeships and other bootstrap programs that can teach coding and other tech tasks to industry novices.

The recruitment crunch goes beyond the Lowcountry, added Ernest Andrade, executive director of the Charleston Digital Corridor.

"There's a global talent shortage," he said.

Teacher talk

After soaking up the conversation, Hyslop wrapped up the night with some thoughts of his own. A concern for the farm-raised Boeing technology chief and die-hard Nebraska Cornhusker is that educators aren't getting the training and other resources they need to teach the skills that businesses require.

"In real estate, it's location, location, location," said the Chicago-based executive, who was promoted to his new role of CTO in July. "To me, it's teachers, teachers, teachers."

Hyslop, dad to two educators, also worries that the U.S. isn't churning out the number of engineering graduates it needs to design new products –- commercial airplanes, for example –- and solve problems. "And that's going to hurt us, competitively," he said.

The Atlantic, by happenstance, published a piece on its website about education spending last week. It offered little comfort. Citing data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the article pointed out that South Carolina was No. 3 among the states that made the deepest funding cuts on a per-student basis at public colleges and universities from 2008 to 2016. The Atlantic included a comment about the trend from the executive director of the S.C. Education Oversight Committee.

"I'm scared to death we won't have students in the pipeline for jobs," Melanie Barton said. She would have fit right in Wednesday.