Some problems are best solved backward. No, we’re not talking about those math riddles you had to solve in middle school. We’re talking about supply, demand, and the supply chain pipeline.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that hiring in logistics, including anyone who would analyze or organize a supply chain, will grow by 19% in the 10 years between 2023 and 2033, which the agency notes is “much faster than average.” (The average growth rate is 4%.) The problem: Where, or how, are organizations going to find the next wave of eager, skilled supply chain professionals?
One school, Old Dominion University, located in Norfolk, Virginia, just a stone’s throw from the largest Navy base in the world and the Port of Virginia, has seemingly cracked the code.
The story of how that happened, and the key ingredients in the successful recipe—local connections, industry receptiveness, and growing supply chain awareness—should make a CFO’s ears perk up. Finance teams may also want to hire these grads, and getting programs up and running with as much speed and flexibility as ODU did will be a key part of the puzzle.
Feels like we only go backward. This is a story told backward, at least partially. A few years ago, a task force looked into potential gaps in ODU’s programs to capitalize on the school’s strategic location, Elspeth McMahon, associate VP of maritime initiatives at the university, told CFO Brew. “Maritime kept coming up,” she explained. “With that study, they decided to create the maritime initiatives with my hire,” which she then spearheaded, starting in 2022.
As the initiatives started to get their bearings, “there was such a strong pull for ODU to invest more in its maritime programs, specifically with supply chain, logistics, and maritime operations,” she said. Unlike many other academic programs, though, part of that pull was coming directly from the companies that graduates could eventually work for.
“The industry really worked with the school, worked with academic affairs, worked with all the faculty and staff here to push for an independent, interdisciplinary school in supply chain, logistics, and maritime operations,” McMahon stressed. “They saw the need, because they’re the ones running the companies that need the employees.”
With the program now up and running, she adds that those employers are “motivated to help make this program a success, in part because of their passion for education and for growing the maritime ecosystem in this region, but also because the workforce is needed. They need a skilled and trained workforce in this region.”
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That unique origin story is part of what drove Kuntal Bhattacharyya, the freshly minted director of ODU’s new school of supply chain, logistics, and maritime operations, to the school.
“Often, the industry pushes universities to take action toward a certain area, but the university has its own ecosystem within which it operates. It doesn’t have to always respond to the industry’s needs,” he explained. At ODU, even at the most senior levels of leadership, Bhattacharyya felt administrators understood “the needs of the industry,” and responded “in a manner that I have really not seen in my 20 years in the academic setting. Academia runs very slow.”
Growing interest. Of course, another key ingredient behind ODU’s ability to take decisive action was a growing awareness and interest in supply chain studies from students.
“When I graduated and went into the industry, there were not too many supply chain programs,” Bhattacharyya noted. Though college counselors might know to push business-oriented students into fields like accounting, finance, or marketing, even just a few years ago, mentioning supply chain would feel like “you’re from Mars,” in his telling. “To an extent, that changed with the pandemic.”
“One of the big things that came out of Covid was that supply chain was on everyone’s mind,” McMahon pointed out. “Prior to Covid, people did not know how things moved from A to B. They ordered things online, and just expected it to appear, and never gave it a thought.”
That newfound awareness helped students like Shane Athey-Strayer, a senior at ODU studying maritime and supply chain management, to find the program. He “always had an affinity for water,” he told CFO Brew, swimming competitively and teaching sailing, and initially studied engineering with the aim of designing ships. Once he learned about the dual maritime and supply chain degree, “it just clicked,” he said.
Recruitment era. For CFOs and other finance leaders who might want to hire supply chain graduates, the message is simple.
Insight into future business conditions “is the key of financial success,” Bhattacharyya noted. “Supply chain managers have the greatest visibility into where a disruption can happen, how those prices can be hiked or spiked in the next few weeks or months or years to come.”
“What would geopolitics mean in the context of my specific supply chain?” he continued. “A supply chain manager has access to all that holistic information, which is why supply chain is probably the most important discipline in today’s interconnected world, where everything affects everything.”