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The nonprofit Veterans Green Jobs is expanding its training program to the East Coast via a partnership with Northern Virginia Community College and Virginia Tech.

Veterans Green Jobs trains veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to pursue energy conservation jobs. NVCC and Virginia Tech had already been collaborating to develop workforce training and for-credit curriculum in the alternative energy and "smart grid" fields, according to Chris Applegate, regional director of workforce development for the community college.

"NOVA has very little at the moment in terms of green jobs training and education," Applegate said. "The Green Jobs folks would like to capitalize on what it is we develop."

Some of the workforce development training should be available as online courses through the community college by the end of the year, Applegate said. For-credit courses will take longer to develop and get approved.

Veteran Green Jobs' main offering is an intensive nine-week course modeled after military training programs, according to spokeswoman Kirsten Maynard. The training is mostly hands-on with a small classroom portion and it lasts eight hours a day for the nine-week period. At the end, participants are nationally certified to perform home energy audits.

The nonprofit also partners with local businesses to help provide opportunities for hands-on learning of skills like adding insulation or replacing water heaters to make homes more energy efficient.

The Virginia program marks the first East Coast expansion for Veterans Green Jobs, which is based in Denver and launched its first training programs in Colorado this year. Virginia students will begin training in 2010, Maynard said.

"Virginia has a pretty big veteran community and the two colleges that we're partnering with both have wonderful natural resource and environmental training programs already," she said.

Ultimately, NVCC's environmental science programs could grow to encompass energy generation, energy transmission, "green" construction design and other skills in demand, Applegate said.

"This is being done as a mission of the community college to make sure that we're staying ahead of the curve," he said. "Industries will be created here that aren't here yet."

Just one technology, new electric power "smart grids," requires new skills at every level, he said, "from installation ... all the way to changes in marketing, changes in management, changes in billing."

Everyone who will be working on the "smart grid" will be required to have a certification by December 2010, Applegate said. "It's going to be a job creator."