June 24, 2026
Covering Annandale, Bailey's Crossroads, Lincolnia, and Seven Corners in Fairfax County, Virginia

New facility at NOVA will offer one-stop registration

#development education NOVA
The new building under construction on the Annandale campus of Northern Virginia Community College will provide one-stop registration, says Robert Vaughn, director of workforce development and continuing education. The facility, expected to open in January, will house student registration, a testing center, book store, campus police, counselors, business center, nine new classrooms, and a Starbucks.
“We are light years ahead of what other community colleges are doing,” Vaughn told members of the Rotary Club of Annandale at the group’s weekly luncheon Wednesday at the Juke Box Diner.
“Our charge is to help the economy grow,” Vaughn says. His office works with local companies to develop training programs for employees, as well as provide continuing education classes. NOVA has 74,000 students in the academic program and 225,000 in various work force development programs.
Vaughn believes “learning is a lifetime investment.” NOVA educates adults who want to change careers or keep up to date on new developments in their fields and also serves people “who have always wanted to learn a new skill, like basket weaving or sign language.” His office also provides assistance to help companies reorganize to become more effective and figure out what kind of professional development their employees need.

One of the programs Vaughn is most proud of is NOVA’s Purple Heart program, which has taught 490 severely injured veterans to handle call center operations. Vaughn’s office is working on a new initiative to design a certification program for people in wastewater management. About three-quarters of the people working in that industry in Virginia are expected to retire soon, which means “a huge amount of institutional knowledge will be lost,” he says.

“The flavor is changing” on the Annandale campus, Vaughn notes. It used to be more of a place for adult students, who would just come for a class or two and leave. But now more students are coming directly from high school and tend to hang around all day. As four-year colleges have gotten more expensive and harder to get into, community colleges like NOVA are a much better deal, he says. And after two years, you can transfer to just about any state college. NOVA is offering more online classes to meet the growing demand.

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