DC Velocity - January 2014

Art van Bodegraven may be reached at (614) 893-9414 or avan@columbus.rr.com. You can read his blog at http://blogs.dcvelocity.com/the_art_of_art/. Kenneth B. Ackerman, president of The Ackerman Company, can be reached at (614) 488-3165 or ken@warehousing-forum.com.

WHERE WILL TOMORROW’S WORKERS COME FROM?

Some will come from universities, sure. But many will arrive directly from high school. Some will need associates degrees from community colleges or for-profit schools. Some will need functional certification (typically easily obtained in short training programs). Some will return from military service, either fully or partially trained.

Regardless of education, training, or certification options involved, there are nontraditional talent pools available. Examples include people with physical or emotional limitations, immigrant populations, sec-ond-job/income workers, students, stay-at-home parents, and displaced experienced workers.

The points are:

▪ We have a staggering range of job opportunities within the supply chain realm;

▪ We have a surprising number of potential supply chain resources;

▪ We have a wide range of learning/train-ing options available; and

▪ We need a comprehensive set of approaches to match people with appropriate education and preparation, and employment opportunities.

Somebody’s going to have to engineer, design, test, and roll out those octocopters. Somebody’s going to have to fix the broken ones. Someone’s going to have to figure out how to lay out a facility for them to pick things up (and plan how to put things away when they either arrive or are returned). Somebody’s going to have to deal with the customer whose package fell from the sky into a neighbor’s backyard. Somebody’s going to have to test the technology behind the octo-execution. And somebody’s going to have to test, evaluate, and hire the people who do all that.

Welcome to the complex new world of supply chain talent management. ;

not formally include the scope and span of end-to-end supply chains in our planning, synchronization, and execution until early in this century. But our work-force development at the functional level continued to point to how to fill needs, real or prospective, in truck drivers and ware-house/distribution center workers.

TODAY’S REALITY

We will not for a second dispute the need to make truck driving a more attractive career option, to bring more people into the field. We will continue to need large numbers of order pickers and forklift drivers.

And we almost desperately need to
bring university students into sup-
ply chain programs rather than have
them drift into marketing or some
other field of study.

But in between, we have enormous needs for a range of skills and talents that we did not anticipate a few years ago. Customer service representatives, service technicians, Some estimates claim that 85 percent of supply chain jobs do not require university degrees, and a growing percentage of those are not in traditional logistics (order picking, material handling, driving) functions.