Based on sessions at the Warehousing Education and Research Council’s (WERC) Annual Conference, the South Africa Production and Inventory Control Society’s Annual Conference and the APICS International Conference and Symposium, the following observations are provided concerning the current gap in talent availability in the supply chain management field.

It is difficult to pick up a trade magazine without finding an article or commentary on the “Supply Chain Management Talent Gap.” One estimate from a session at the APICS 2015 Conference placed the requirement for skilled workers at around two million by 2025.

Another attendee stated that his company was facing the reality of over 40% of his supply chain workforce reaching retirement age in the next “few years.”

Facing the “Perfect Storm” in supply chain recruitment

Couple this with the continued realization that competitiveness in today’s business environment depends on a responsive, agile supply chain, and it starts to become obvious that the talent gap is a reality.

Adding to this shortfall of talent is the difficulty that Supply Chain Management Programs at some institutions are having with attracting faculty to meet the growth requirements for teaching Supply Chain Management.

There are also fewer PhD’s coming out of the programs, and they are graduating into the job market at too slow a rate to backfill retirees. It would appear that we may be facing the “perfect storm” in the supply chain management talent acquisition and retention.

What the schools are teaching graduate students has to be different from what we are teaching undergraduates.

This point was agreed upon by both the academics and industry representatives in all the sessions conducted.

Understanding the “big picture” of supply chain management

One concern was that MBA students need to have a better understanding of the end-to-end supply chain and the ability to think from a systems perspective when viewing supply chain issues. They need to understand the relationships between the other aspects of industry and the supply chain.

Another concern from industry is that graduates of a Supply Chain Management program should have some knowledge of scheduling and engineering in order to understand facility layout and facility design. That understanding, they argue, is necessary to enable them to solve flow issues in facilities.

This sentiment was echoed by another industry representative, who suggested that an in-depth understanding of some basic engineering practices and Material Requirements Planning would allow   graduates to be more like generalists and of a greater benefit to the company.

Industry attendees said what they need in graduates are specialists in supply chain management: “This should be the focus of Supply Chain Management programs.”

Industry professionals want graduates that understand the “big picture and where they are in the picture.” According to them, schools need to get graduates “away from silo thinking, and to have communication skills that cut across cultures, people differences, while understanding how to optimize a facility or operation.”

Focus on relevant, up to date case studies

A primary requirement identified by the attendees at all of the sessions was relevancy. What are the students learning and how current and relevant are the course materials? One anecdotal story in the discussion concerned a decades old case study being used to discuss supply chain IT.

The concern of the members of the session centered on the relevancy of such an old case study for supply chain management or IT. Case studies should be used, but they have to be current and relevant if the students are going to learn from them.

Another area of concern is the ability to think critically.

Can the students coming out to the respective supply chain/logistics programs analyze a situation and be able to relate the cases, lectures, and discussions to the projects that they are assigned to?

There was a discussion of the ability to apply Lean concepts and Six Sigma to supply chain and logistics operations, as well as the need for project management skills. Several companies represented in the sessions explained the need to understand Six Sigma and have at least a cursory understanding of Lean and Six Sigma early in a career.

The consensus of the attendees was that there should be a working knowledge of both Six Sigma and Lean principles in the formal education process, in order to allow new graduates to be prepared to assume the roles of project leadership.

The same holds true for the Theory of Constraints. Attendees expressed the belief that graduates should arrive at their new company with a basic understanding of TOC from their operations management and supply chain courses.

Determining “the What” and “the Why” of big data

An area of consensus was the graduates of supply chain and logistics programs need to be able to determine “the what” and “the why” of supply chain data, and be able to format the data so that it is expandable, exportable and useable to convert into meaningful information.

Another aspect of “soft skills” discussed was the need for college graduates to have basic finance and accounting skills, to include budgeting and personal finance skills.

Here is a great example of what can be implemented in academia to help prepare graduates. Schools should establish classes on basic “soft skills” to prepare students to be more competitive during the interview process.

Making decisions on risk assessment and inventory management

Risk analysis skills are also critical. This is crucial from a safety perspective, as well as from a business risk analysis perspective.

Students need to be exposed to business risk analysis as part of their formal education process.

Risk assessment is considered a skill set that future leaders and managers need exposure to while still in school.  As one corporate attendee pointed out, this needs to be both training and education.

Other critical aspects that need to be included in supply chain programs, according to the industry participants in the sessions, are warehouse/DC layout design, basic supply chain systems such as ERP/WMS/TMS/Inventory Management knowledge, and how to use the outputs from the systems to make decision.

There was also concern for the lack of instruction on shipping/shipper coalitions and their impacts. Several companies mentioned the need to have students more than just aware of these topics and the link between our industry and sustainability measures and practices.

Continuing to discuss global supply chain competencies and the needs and shortfalls in the education system for our future workforce will help all of us to educate, train, attract and hire quality employees and begin to close the widening gap in supply chain talent.

The post Bringing education into the future is the key to bridging the supply chain talent gap appeared first on Trade Ready.

If it affects recruiters like me, think of how impactful that same constant change is within the complex world of supply chain logistics.

Supply chain logistics has never been an easy industry.  With many different pieces, parts and partners, it’s a fluid environment.  Most companies are embracing lean initiatives, and everyone has their mind set on better, easier, and more streamlined and efficient ways of doing business.

With each advancement in technology, the way companies do business internally, and with each other is changing.

This is very evident in the supply chain management (SCM) employment market as well.

There have been so many advances in the industry over the last century, starting with Ford inventing the first moving assembly line in 1913.  In the ‘50s we had the ocean container, the ‘60s EDI, the ‘70s the UPC, the ‘80s the ERP system, and in the ‘90s the birth of the mainstream Internet.

Those changes, albeit over a long period of time, have significantly advanced our industry.  But since the ‘90s, the technology has come so far and so fast that I could not list it all in this article.

This leads us to a few questions:

How does this technological advancement affect the labor market?

How do companies ensure they are hiring to the technology?

Finally, how fast can a company change direction with a new system, software, or tool and expect the team to keep up?

Train for the new needs of the workplace

If you are looking to have a future in SCM, then you need to be smart, fast, flexible, engaged, intuitive, and above all else analytical.  Companies have more complex roles to fill than ever before, which drive this super-technical environment we now live and work within.

It is now much more common to find a manufacturer looking for a Supply Chain Director with an engineering background than one looking for a warehouse worker.  Just twenty years ago, it was the other way around.

Cisco Systems’ SVP of Supply Chain Operations, John Kern, recently said “The supply chain industry is undergoing one of the most massive talent shifts we have ever seen.”

To prepare future professionals to survive and thrive in the talent shift, universities need to do a better job of preparing SCM students to handle the quick moving and rapidly changing environment. Students need more cross-functional internships with real life hands-on training.

When considering a university program, think about how well prepared you will be at graduation. Academic education can only get you so far. Hands on training, internships, field trips, and real word experience from professors or professionals who have recently worked in the industry is what will provide you the best start to a promising career.

Students need to dive in and get their hands dirty.

They must have the ability to multitask, change direction with flexibility, and they must possess the discipline to ask questions until they find the right answers.  They need to think for themselves under great pressure and analyze solutions.

According to a recent article in Inbound Logistics, The Top Universities for Supply Chain Technology Education, “It has never been more important for new professionals in the supply chain field to have experience with the digital tools that are essentially the backbone of major supply chain operations.”  Because of this importance, they partnered with Software Advice, who compiled a recent ranking of top SCM programs in the U.S.

These programs are doing a better job of incorporating software and technology in to their SCM programs, and are a good place to consider for either an undergrad interested in the industry or as a returning student looking to remain relevant and current for their career advancement.

Make a lifelong commitment to technological training

Since jobs are becoming more and more complex, and companies have a lot on the line when hiring someone to handle these large and ever-changing supply chains, we implemented some tools of our own to use in the hiring process.

We have started using video interviewing to offer our clients a better picture of who our candidates are.  We think this gives the company a more complete picture than just a resume alone.

However, we found that the software we use, allowing the candidate to login and control the time, pace and place of their interview, causes difficultly for most people over 50.

In comparison, the Millennials sign in, and with little effort turn in a high quality video.

The younger candidates are, in most cases, using better computers or tablets, and are comfortable enough to be articulate and expressive.  Frequently, their responses about the process are that they are impressed with the ease and simplicity of getting their first interview out of the way.

Many older candidates, however, push back on having to do it at all, and usually stumble with technical difficultly. More often than not, the video comes back to us as unusable.  It magnifies the challenges older candidates struggle with when using new technology and it brings up the obvious concern – will they be able to learn and use the technology on the job?

My recommendation for those that are not very tech savvy, is to brush up on new technology in any of the following ways:

• Follow blogs
• Sign up for industry newsletters
• Listen to podcasts
• Watch videos on YouTube
• Become active on social media

Become as familiar as possible with the technology being used within your organization, as well as in the industry.  Beyond staying current with technology, certifications are a great way to ensure that you are still learning about industry trends.

Everyone needs to get on the same page

After doing some evaluating of the most difficult positions to fill, we decided to partner with our clients in offering candidate aptitude and performance predictability testing, along with the ability to create a job benchmark to ensure that we are hiring the right person for the job.

As it turns out, many roles have become so complex that each person on the hiring team often has trouble agreeing on what skills are needed to do the job.

Creating a job benchmark, which the hiring team agrees on, and then hiring the person who most closely matches that benchmark, ensures success.

Studies prove that going through this added value process increases both employee job satisfaction, as well as better job performance and stability for the company.

It is because of the complexity of these jobs that we, in the supply chain recruitment industry, are embracing new technology ourselves in order to deliver the results that clients expect to see when placing new team members into their organization.

Looking into the future of supply chain

Looking toward the future, there is a lot of talk about, Big Data, IoT (the Internet of Things), total connectivity, increased cloud-based solutions, and even robots.

Robots? Who thought that would happen in our lifetime?  All of this will continue to drive advancements in SCM.

In the end, with every step we take in technological advancement we still must strive to master the basics.

We seek to increase transparency and visibility while controlling development, replenishment, maintenance, production, transportation, delivery and customer satisfaction.

Then, of course, we need to do all this without forgetting to drive efficiencies and mitigate risk and loss.

It is a good time to work in this industry: jobs are plentiful and salaries are increasing at a rapid rate. According to the U.S. Department of Labor,

“Employment of logisticians is projected to grow 22 percent from 2012 to 2022, much faster than the average for all occupations. Employment growth will be driven by the important role logistics plays in the transportation of goods in a global economy.”

With a very strong prediction for record growth in an advancing industry, we now all need to do a better job of learning and embracing the technology that drives that growth. Our jobs, and our future, depend on it.

The post Are you falling behind as technology transforms supply chain recruitment? appeared first on Trade Ready.