Tertiary qualifications provide relief to a skills strapped industry

The current management training challenge facing the industry was brought into stark relief during the recent SAPICS convention where I chatted to a number of key company representatives who have been forced to promote key staff to new levels of tactical and strategic management positions. This has resulted in a situation where highly experienced professionals, who may have just focussed on warehousing and fleet management, have found their positions professionalised to the level of supply chain manager.

The watershed 2013 CSIR State of Logistics Report looked at the results of this sudden onset of a required professional level in some detail and found that the focus on transforming individual positions to management positions required a broad componentry of skills, underpinned by a broader view of the economy and in-depth managerial development.

Opening of positions

In addition, the Scarce Skills List, published by the Department of Labour, revealed that the sudden professionalisation of the industry will open approximately 132,000 positions. Note that doesn't mean that there are now 132,000 vacancies but rather that there are 132,000 tactical and strategic positions required within key professional areas such as manager, controller, supervisor or tactician. In turn each of these areas needs to be made up of the correctly proportioned number of operational, tactical and strategic personnel.

The reality is, however, that while there are currently enough operations personnel, there are not enough supervisory elements built into the logistics industry. This therefore results in enormous pressure to boost the number of supply chain managers at strategic and tactical levels, as opposed to purely functional operators.

To pull the necessary personnel through the ranks of each of these four disciplines, the industry will differentiate tactical managers from better operational people within each band and where tactical managers are already positioned, they will be uplifted to the broader supply chain management level. The key issue is that to achieve this, tactical people urgently require tertiary qualifications like a higher certificate, while on a strategic level, they require the minimum of a Bachelor's degree.

Myriad of qualifications

To date, professional bodies have offered a myriad of international, professional qualifications that the broader industry has agreed warehouse and fleet managers must have. Unfortunately, these courses have a specific focus in the form of certificate courses in specific areas. Due to its relative youth as a formalised professional discipline, the supply chain and logistics industry has not yet developed a fully mature accompanying academic discipline, resulting in a scenario where very few professionals have a logistics-specific tertiary qualification. In fact it's virtually unheard of to find anyone with a Master's in Logistics, let alone a Doctoral degree, working in the industry.

For the industry to continue growing as it is at present, this academic discipline must grow with it. But there is a huge disparity between academic development and the needs of the industry.

The first reason for this is that it is simply not practical for already employed supply chain and logistics professionals to attend residential universities, given that the majority of them are full time employees, whose time is already fully accounted for.

Another problem is that for many management professionals, it has been 20 years or more since they were at the other end of a course/lecture, so it takes time for them to re-adopt a 'student/learning' mindset and often they achieve this only after they have failed their courses.

Huge role to play

This is where the ILSCM has a huge role to play in growing the current managerial skills base within the industry, as it aims to address the specific need for higher education degrees and management training for professionals.

Our degree offering covers financial management, business management, transport economics, procurement management, research and systems, marketing and supply chain management to name but a few. We are also highly aware that for it to be practically applied by managers in specific areas of the supply chain, our training modules should also be imparting the skills that allow professionals to manage businesses, people, finances, budgets and resources.

To achieve this level of learning we have adopted a learning delivery model that is both flexible and supportive, or what is known in the broader education milieu as mixed- or multi-modal delivery. The terms mixed-modal and multi-modal are often interchangeably used, due to both utilising a variety of simultaneous delivery methods e.g. distance, e-learning and face-to-face contact.

Course content

Multi-modal sees course content being repeated through various channels, while mixed-modal uses the most suitable method to deliver a specific component of a course. For example, an equation could be more accurately conveyed through a video recording of a lecturer explaining the equation rather than through an explanation in a textbook.

With supported distance learning, students have the flexibility of distance learning, with course materials and other necessary resources being sent in the post or made available online, which allows employed students to study at their own pace. Contact classes are supplementary, not compulsory, and contact with lecturers is technologically mediated using tools such as white boards and online platforms.

It is therefore clear that the local supply chain and logistics fraternity are in dire need of dedicated, suitably tailored degrees. However, far from being a death sentence, this is an opportunity that the sector should welcome and feel supported in achieving. We honestly feel that there is a model to support the industry in achieving this and we hope to take the industry to far greater heights with this strategy.