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Southwest Virginians have spent decades wanting more skilled and technical jobs that could help keep young people from leaving the region.

Be careful what you wish for.

"For the first time in my history, we've got more skilled jobs than we can fill," said Ed Whitmore, Smyth County administrator and a longtime player in the region's economic development.

"We've been screaming for high-tech jobs out here for years. Now we've got them. We feel like the dog who's caught the car," he said.

The region had about 1,700 job vacancies last year, including some 700 information technology jobs, based on figures from the Virginia Department of Business Assistance. Whitmore came up with the idea of trying to fill some by recruiting former residents who might want to come back.

The result was "Return to Roots," a name suggested by one of the Virginia Tech students with whom Whitmore discussed the concept. He and others formed a committee to give it a try.

The business assistance department lists some 24,000 jobs to be created during the next 36 months, Shannon Blevins, project director at its Abingdon office, said Friday. These are in planning districts 1-4, roughly from Montgomery County to the western tip of Virginia.

Last year, there were some 1,700 technical jobs open in those four planning districts, she said.

The Return to Roots program was originally envisioned to run from Montgomery County west. Organizers sought a $400,000 grant and got $135,000, and so had to scale down the region to Lee, Scott, Wise, Russell, Buchanan, Dickenson and Tazewell counties and the cities of Norton and Bristol. Heather Porterfield, business developer with Anderson & Associates in Blacksburg, is doing a second proposal for next spring, seeking $576,000 to cover the original region as well as Southside Virginia.

The localities around Russell County were chosen because the county landed a CGI information software plant, which has already hired more than 100 people, and Northrop-Grumman, which will begin hiring this year for an information technology center that is being built.

The program's first success is Keith Brown, a Tazewell County native working at Lockheed Martin in Ohio. He learned of the program during an annual camping trip with longtime friend Dan Kegley of Smyth County.

"Return to Roots got us in contact with the key people about the hiring," Brown said. He got a call from CGI, the information technology company starting an operation in Russell County, about a job as a senior developer. In the meantime, Brown and his wife, Judy, also employed at Lockheed, were offered a chance to work on its presidential helicopter program in upstate New York.

She had always been a city gal but had to concede that the Southwest Virginia jobs were better. "Every time we got a piece of the puzzle, she would just grin and say 'I hate you,' " he said.

The initial grant has gone toward publicizing Return to Roots, trying to reach graduates from the region's high schools, and for a Web site developed by the Virginia Economic Bridge office in Radford.

It has drawn interest to employers outside the initial seven counties. "There have been some resumes sent to some companies in Blacksburg," said Carl Mitchell, Bridge president. "The benefits are moving east."

Susan Dickerson, marketing and project coordinator at the Economic Bridge office for Return to Roots, said the Web site can advertise job openings for businesses. "They can put their job postings on our site for free. There is no charge."

Job seekers also can register at the site.

But the program is also pursuing less high-tech ways of reaching former Southwest Virginians, said Blevins. Rack cards have gone to all chambers of commerce in the region, in the hope that parents or grandparents will put them on refrigerators where children may see them on trips home. "Many of them don't know that the jobs are here right now," Blevins said.

Whitmore said the first idea was to get high school graduation lists for the past 20 years and start contacting graduates. But with 37 high schools in the seven-county region, that task has proved daunting and more time-intensive than anticipated.

"We think we've got about 15,000 who have left this region in the last 20 years," he said, and maybe twice that number if the region east through Montgomery County gets added. "We have a work force in exile that would like to come back ... I think this is our best shot ever in Southwest Virginia to demonstrate that we can change that employment mix."

On the Web: www.returntoroots.org