Logistics Hiring Gap Growing Toward 200,000 Workers, Study Suggests
11/20/2012 - by William B. Cassidy, Senior Editor
Trucking
may have its driver shortage and the airlines a pilot shortage, but
those problems are only part of a larger supply chain labor challenge.
About
270,200 logistics jobs will be created each year in the U.S. between 2012 and
2018, according to a study from the Georgia Center of
Innovation for Logistics, a division of the state’s economic
development department. But U.S. vocational schools, colleges and universities
are only producing about 75,280 formally trained, degreed or certified workers
a year qualified for those jobs, the study found.
“We’ve
identified a pretty staggering gap,” said Page Siplon, the logistics center’s
executive director, a shortage of at least 195,000 qualified logistics
employees.
“It’s no
surprise,” he said. “The supply chain industry is growing pretty fast, and as
the economy grows so do supply chain needs and the amount of freight we move
all over the world. There are big gaps in how we’re going to meet future
demand.”
In its
study, the Georgia logistics center set out to quantify that labor demand and
identify ways to meet it. The logistics employment challenge, Siplon said,
could be bigger than the study projects. “This is the tip of the iceberg,”
Siplon said. “The numbers that we put in the report are a small but
representative sample” of total logistics employment and demand across multiple
industries, he said.
The number
of new logistics jobs forecast by 2016 alone “would be much larger if we could
take a comprehensive look at where opportunities are going to be,” Siplon said.
“Even so, we’re talking about a million jobs. That starts the conversation.”
It
certainly does. Failure to adequately invest in logistics education and
training would be comparable to the failure to invest in infrastructure such as
highways, ports and bridges. Either would undermine the competitiveness
of U.S. businesses on a global scale over the long-term and to hamper near-term
growth.
“If we’re
going to really focus and realize that supply chains and logistics play an
important role in U.S. competitiveness, we need to recognize that and measure
that at the federal level,” said Siplon, who in October was appointed to the
Department of Commerce U.S. Advisory Committee on Supply
Chain Competitiveness.
Logistics
education needs to take a big leap to meet the growing demand for logistics
workers, Siplon said. Logistics programs of all types, from vocational training
for truck drivers to global supply chain degree programs, need to shift
to higher gear not just to meet the demand for more workers, but for
better workers, he said. “It’s a challenge not just in terms of quantity, but
in quality,” as new technologies and processes reshape domestic andinternational
logistics networks.
In
particular, Siplon says the rapid growth of e-commerce and the
evolution of logistics software create a need for more technologically savvy
employees.
For
generations, “logistics has been an on-the-job-training sort of industry,”
Siplon said. “But today the demands customers place on companies are changing,
and that’s leading to a whole new wave of technology, new ways to do
fulfillment. These skills need to be trained and you can’t just do on-the-job
training. If we’re not doing this training in our educational programs, it’s
not going to happen,” he said.
Out of the
270,200 jobs created each year, 115,480 will be in trucking, and another
125,160 in warehousing and distribution, according to the logistics center.
Logistics operation management will account for another 12,660 and industrial
engineering for 12,110. Based on Labor Department data, the logistics center
claims trucking has a current labor shortage, including drivers, of 98,884,
while warehousing and distribution is short 92,506 of the workers it needs. The
rail industry, in comparison, is short 4,368 workers, while businesses with
logistics operations and management openings are short 3,873 employees, the
study found.
Siplon’s
projected employment numbers are based on data from the U.S. Labor Department,
data that is problematic and difficult to gather simply because the department
doesn’t treat freight logistics as a distinct or integrated industry.
“To make
the comparison between supply and demand, labor and education, you need to
compare apples to apples,” Siplon said. “We need to create data that is
representative of the logistics business.” For example, the department
considers flight attendants and taxi drivers as transportation workers, “but
they’re not logistics workers,” Siplon said. “They’re not moving freight.”
The
logistics center recommends better coordination and selection of data at the
federal level between the labor and education departments to present a truer
picture of the interconnected workforce needed in today’s supply chains.
“We need
to fix that system at the Labor Department so we can improve our knowledge of
what the industry really looks like and make fine-tuned improvements in the
future,” Siplon said. “Logistics truly is an industry now and it needs to be
recognized as such.” That’s just as true for academia as for federal and state
regulatory agencies. “We need to change the perception of logistics, and we
need to encourage greater awareness of logistics earlier in education, even at
the high school level,” he said. He noted that an increasing number of high
schools are offering supply chain courses, often in cooperation with colleges
that have supply chain programs such as Georgia Southern University or Penn
State.
“We need
to be thinking about who’s going to be running things 20 years from now,” he
said.