Williamsburg High School junior Matthew Burkhart said he wants to start his own business after graduation, and learning the ins and outs of the supply chain will help that goal.
Burkhart was one of the students who attended the Northern Kentucky University Global Supply Chain Bootcamp. As part of the boot camp, the students attended a tour at Verst Logistics in Hebron on March 14.
“Not so many people go there [Williamsburg] as other schools around us, so the rare opportunities like this [NKU boot camp], it’s nice to take advantage of them, especially when it’s cost-free,” Burkhart told LINK nky. “So getting to see this and go out and get tours, it’s nice and interesting to learn.”
NKU Director of the Supply Chain Management program, Mark Thackeray, said the week-long boot camp involves about 38 students from eight area high schools in Ohio and Kentucky. Given the current high demand for skilled workers in this field, the goal of NKU’s boot camp is to pique students’ interest in the supply chain and create a talent pipeline for employers.
Thackeray said during the tour that he originally helped create the boot camp for high schoolers specifically because there is a marketing issue in the realm of supply chain management.
“A lot of people think of supply chain as trucks and boxes, which is certainly a small part of that,” he said. “Supply chain management is much bigger. It’s a business optimization approach to all of the different entities that exist within our supply chains. So, the biggest thing I wanted out of this was the students to get a better understanding of what supply chain is, and maybe what it isn’t.”
He said one of the things that NKU designed for the week was giving the students a lot of experiential learning. They visited places like TQL Stadium in Cincinnati, Castellini Company in Wilder and ended the week at Verst Logistics.
Verst Logistics was founded in 1966 by Bill Verst. The company employs roughly 2,200 people, 600 of whom are directly employed in Boone, Kenton and Campbell Counties.
“The Northern Kentucky, Greater Cincinnati area, has really become a supply chain hub over the last 20 years,” said Verst Logistics Vice President of Transportation Chris Verst. “Our location here allows us to reach 85% of the country’s population within two-day shipping. So, from an inventory management and distribution standpoint, this has really become a supply chain hub.”
Thackeray added to that idea.
He said the region’s airport, with its infrastructure for cargo that can move goods overnight, attracts more company interest. He said the area still has relatively inexpensive land, and there is a good quality of life here.
As a result, as businesses continue to expand or move to Northern Kentucky, NKU recognizes the need for a talent pipeline before jobs are created, which helped form the global supply chain management program. The boot camp itself is a feeder program to higher education and job opportunities for the students who attend it.
Verst Logistics Senior Vice President of Human Resources Jeff Greelish said filling these supply chain jobs is critically important because they are how a product gets to its destination, whether it’s someone’s home or a store.
“We do some work with the junior achievement community, with trying to try to promote this type of supply chain work,” Greelish said. “Then, different events. We will go to job fairs and different things like that within colleges to try to encourage folks to pursue the supply chain work.”
Verst said Verst Logistics was the original sponsor of the NKU supply chain hub. As part of that, they sponsored some scholarships and provided direct training and mentorship to the students. Greelish said they then try to have annual meetings with the scholarship winners to talk to them about supply chain and their future careers.
While Greelish said he doesn’t think fewer people are entering the supply chain industry, the field has become more specialized and challenging. Verst added that the skillset needed is changing.
“When you operate at a warehouse in the 60s, you did it on a yellow ledger paper,” Verst said. “As the supply chains continue to get more complex and customers become more demanding, it’s created a new need for a new skill set. That’s why we partner with NKU to make sure that we’re training the next generation of leaders in the more specialized fields of industrial engineering and project management and systems maintenance and that sort of thing that’s the absolute backbone of supply chain.”
Burkhart said the boot camp has given him insight into what goes on in the world around him, such as how consumers’ everyday goods like toilet paper are transported.
“Whatever interests you have, it can be applied in some way,” Burkhart said. “Even if you’re a server, the food that you’re going deliver to people, it’s coming from somewhere in this huge global supply chain.”
