New strategies needed to address skills shortage

Skills shortages continue to challenge the freight and logistics industry with a 27% shortage in filling critical positions, creating a need for new strategies around training and skills development. “Global economic pressure and rapid advances in technology and the knowledgebased economy have plunged much of the world into a skills shortage crisis. In South Africa, the problem is compounded by a history of poor quality education and limited opportunities,” says Dr Frances Wright, lecturer for the Institute of Logistics and Supply Chain Management (ILSCM). Barloworld’s 2015 Supply Chain Foresight report states that 59% of respondents believe a lack of intuition and a shortage of skills are top constraints to being able to adapt to supply chain changes. According to Wright, solutions to the problem need to be effective not only on a broad scale, but must adapt to the speed at which change is happening. “Developing efficiencies within end-to-end supply chain integration is now critical for strong financial performance and to mitigate the effect of escalating logistics costs. Thus strategically, investment in logistics and supply chain management skills is a vital contributor to a profitable bottom line,” she says. Wright adds that in such a rapidly developing and changing industry, skilled practitioners not only need the required hard skills and work experience, but also the soft skills. The University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Psychological Services and Career Development (PsyCaD) Recruitment Guide 2015 found that most human resources (HR) practitioners placed softer skills, particularly customerfocused management, well ahead of the required hard skills. Students, however, prioritise such skills much further down their lists. According to Kobashini Kallen, career consultant at UJ, this discrepancy could be accounted for by the lack of real-world experience in the industry on the student’s part. “This does of course create a disconnect between the needs of employers and the skills pool available,” she says, noting that this kind of gap often means that many career candidates, despite having degrees, are fully qualified for a position. A logistics management and training blog noted that while there was no shortage of resources for teaching and developing the technical skills required to become a supply chain professional – university programmes, learnerships and in-house training – there was far less obvious support for organisations that wanted to enable their supply chain experts to develop skills in areas such as leadership, communication and teamwork.