Andel on distribution: The Boys and Girls of logistics

By Tom Andel -- Logistics Management, 2/1/2008

There are too many young people jumping into their lofty career plans without proper seasoning. Joe Sing, executive director of the Memphis Area Boys & Girls Club’s Technical Training Center, thinks logistics is just the ingredient to prepare kids for the real world. His center is located in the heart of logistics central—near FedEx and UPS headquarters. His strategy is to train kids in logistics basics so they have some practical business skills to offer future employers.

“There’s a lot of unskilled labor in this region, and we’re making efforts to remedy that,” Sing told me recently. “We had lots of people who graduated the Boys and Girls Club as seniors in high school with plans of going to college. Fifty percent of those that started in college didn’t finish out the first year. Then they’re back on the street without a skill and without a job. With some of these logistics jobs they can go to school while doing that job and then move up in the company.”

FedEx is a prime example of that. Sing feels even if logistics isn’t at the top of the list of career goals, it will at least give these kids some practical business acumen. This is a good thing, especially for the typical Boys and Girls Club client: someone 16-21 years old and considered “at risk.”

At the Memphis Technical Training Center, students learn both soft and hard skills. Examples of the latter include forklift operations, picking, packing, and inventory management. But Sing feels the soft skills are the ones that will make his students most employable: team building, presentation skills, and conflict resolution.

If what I read in the business papers is true, Sing is on the right track. A recent article in the Washington Post says not only do businesses want people with practical work experience, but so do most business schools. The article quotes an MBA student who says he doesn’t respect fellow students who haven’t been out in the working world before entering business school: “The worst MBA classmate or project partner to endure is the one who has nothing to contribute,” the student said. “Those with little experience that somehow make it through the gatekeeper in the admission office become deadwood in class.”

This MBA student believes that several years spent knowing an industry and an organization are more meaningful than jumping from class to class in a university. Business school can wait. Smart businesses understand how valuable their real-world classrooms can be, so many are recruiting at undergraduate colleges and even at high schools to find interns that may make valuable employees some day. That’s smart because their current workforce is aging, leaving…disappearing.

Joe Sing is one of a handful of visionaries filling a skills void in the logistics world. His program is now in its second year, and he says he can find jobs for anybody who succeeds in his program. For more information on what Joe Sing is trying to do, visit www.bgcm.org, or call him at 901-774-3074.