Transportation Officials Urge National Effort to Attract Next Generation of Industry Talent

With the nation’s transportation system facing a shortage of skilled talent, many industry executives, academic experts and government officials are calling for a national effort to attract and train more people for transportation-related jobs — from truck drivers and warehouse managers to highway engineers and public policymakers.

For Peter Appel, administrator of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) in Washington, D.C., the problem is twofold: About half of the nation’s 13 million workers involved in transportation, logistics and supply-chain activity soon will be eligible for retirement, and transportation workers and managers now need to have skills different from those they were taught previously, so they can use new technology to do more with less.

“We are facing an era of constrained resources,” Appel said in an interview. “It’s a challenge, but it is also an opportunity for innovative people.”

Appel also said, “It’s about partnerships. No one group will solve the problem.”

UPS Inc., which sits atop the Transport Topics Top 100 For-Hire Carriers list, has developed partnerships with educational institutions and literally pays workers to go to school, offering $3,000 per year and up to $15,000 lifetime to cover tuition costs for both full- and part-time workers.

In Louisville, where the Atlanta-based parcel carrier operates its main North American air hub, students who work part time between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. can attend classes for free at the University of Louisville, Jefferson Community College or Kentucky Technical College. A similar program is available to workers in Chicago through a partnership with five area schools.

At Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey, students who complete a UPS Hub Supervisor Training Program receive credit towards a degree in operations management.

UPS spokeswoman Susan Rosenberg said the company spends about $300 million a year on em-ployee training programs and has spent more than $187 million on tuition assistance for 113,000 students since 1999.

The payoff for the company, Rosenberg said, is a “strong, knowledgeable workforce” and a steady supply of part-time workers who go on to become full-time drivers.

The issue of workforce development is also gaining significance for other transportation employers, as they struggle to find workers with the technical and leadership skills they need to compete successfully in a more complex, global economy.

“People are out there. We need to find the right ones,” said Nancy Stefanowicz, who said she was brought in as senior vice president of human resources at NFI Industries, Cherry Hill, N.J., five years ago by Sid Brown, the company’s chief executive officer, who told her “it was time to take a stronger look at the talent pipeline.”

Over the years, NFI had evolved from a family-owned truckload freight hauler to a multimodal transportation, warehousing and logistics firm. The company ranks No. 24 on the TT for-hire list.

“NFI needs a wide range of workforce skills, from material handler, forklift operator, inventory control, logistics coordinators, drivers, engineers, sales, various information technology skills, finance, human resources, safety, security and leadership,” Stefanowicz said.

RITA allocates $80 million a year to fund research at 136 colleges and universities, and Appel said his agency has taken the lead within DOT to develop a national strategy to meet workforce needs of the future.

Since joining RITA in 2009, Appel said, he has visited many schools to encourage young people to consider careers in the transportation field.

“Kids can relate to transportation,” he said. “We need to talk about it. We have a great story to tell, and it’s incumbent on everyone to show students they can have a huge impact.”

Next year, top officials from the U.S. departments of Transportation, Labor and Education are slated to meet with school administrators, job-training specialists and industry representatives to formulate a plan to meet the training and education requirements for transportation workers in the future.

Current efforts “are often fragmented, with no coordinated strategy,” said Teresa Adams, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the primary organizers of the National Transportation Workforce Summit to be held April 24-26 in Washington.

“A more comprehensive and widely supported strategy is needed to meet the demands of the transportation system,” Adams said.

State transportation agencies face a particularly serious “brain drain,” said Genevieve Giuliano, senior associate dean for research and technology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and president of the Council of University Transportation Centers.

Public-sector wages also have not kept pace with the private sector, Giuliano said.

Someone with a civil engineering degree, for example, can earn 25% to 50% more in the private sector.

“The most capable people chose to work elsewhere,” Giuliano said. “This has reduced the human capital in key public agencies.”

Giuliano said President Obama is “on the right track” in encouraging community colleges to provide more workforce training, but she is concerned that federal and state budget restrictions will limit what schools can do.

“Schools need to find other revenue sources,” she said. “I expect to see more private support. I don’t see any other options.”

Many transportation companies, in fact, are taking steps to provide more training and continuing education for their employees.

“We are partnering with certified schools to train future drivers,” NFI’s Stefanowicz said. “We are working on partnering with agencies to increase our military recruiting efforts. We’ve partnered with Rutgers University for our leadership development program.”

The first leadership class was expected to complete its work this month with each of the 14 participants making a presentation to top management and making suggestions on significant business issues.

“It was a great day,” Stefanowicz said. “There’s trepidation at first as individuals struggle to get insight into other operations. Some of the projects were so detailed. For company executives, seeing the development and watching new leaders emerge is inspiring.”

Last year, instructors from the University of Maryland set up a pilot three-week training program for a group of 26 midlevel managers at CSX Corp.

While the main purpose was to teach broad business and management concepts, Philip Evers, associate professor of logistics management at Maryland, said the course proved to be valuable as a way to identify promising talent, which company officials had expected, but it also provided fertile ground for employees to share ideas about how to improve the business and gave faculty members unexpected fresh insight into the railroad business.

Evers said the highlight for most of the participants was a private tour of Gettysburg and a discussion of leadership styles of the Civil War battlefield generals.

“It was so different,” Evers said. “They wanted to do that again.”

The school will begin a second training program for CSX with 36 participants in October.

At Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton, Wis., a full-time staff of 18 instructors provides driver training for trucking firms, including Schneider National Inc., DeBoer Transportation and Swift Transportation. The school also provides courses in diesel engine service and collision repair.

“We’re seeing more older people who may be out of work or are switching careers,” driving instructor John Mueller said. “Adult learning requires a different pace of information. Some are not as fluent in technology.”

At the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, students are finding that work experience is a key to landing a job in the transportation industry after graduation.

“Recruiters want to see experience,” said Lynn Brown, associate director of the transportation and logistics flagship program at UNF. “You need to do well in classes, but good experience in the workplace is equally important.”

Many students take on multiple internships and noncredit work assignments as a way to test the job market.

“It helps them see where they fit in,” Brown said. “Working in a warehouse, if they don’t like it, they can find something else. The experience helps students narrow down their choices.”

For Lauren DelBovo, a UNF graduate, interest in transportation came naturally. Her father is an executive with Saddle Creek Corp., a warehousing and transportation firm based in Lakeland, Fla., and Lauren works for the company as a management trainee.

“I knew I wanted to go into the business,” Lauren said in a telephone interview from Charlotte, N.C., where she was assigned to supervise more than 100 workers on seven packaging production lines for the past 18 months. “I knew it was an industry that was growing and changing. It seemed a lot more interesting than sitting at a desk.”

Lauren is one of 16 management trainees at Saddle Creek who will spend up to four years in various jobs and locations learning the business.

“We believe in talent development,” said Lauren’s father, Mike DelBovo. “The management train-ees are smart, upwardly mobile and aggressive. It helps us to grow successfully.”

Lauren, who is 24 years old, said she definitely wants to move up in management and believes the training program will give her that opportunity.

“Saddle Creek sets us up to succeed,” she said. “They do not want us to fail.”

One of the keys to attracting more people to jobs in the transportation industry, according to industry, government and education experts, is to get companies and schools to work together.

One such program, called Power Pathways, was established by Pacific Gas & Electric, San Francisco, in 2008.

When the program began, Mario Rendon, interim director of workforce sustainability for PG&E, said the company was looking at a wave of potential retirements by many of its skilled craft workers. The utility also faced stiff competition for engineers from tech firms in near-by Silicon Valley.

While the recession has forestalled some of the expected retirements, Rendon said the company worked with federally funded workforce-development agencies to find potential recruits and then worked with several Bay area community colleges to develop curriculum for a 10- to 15-week course in power engineering and other skilled crafts.

The so-called “bridge” courses are designed for high school graduates and military veterans who do not have college degrees.

“These are good paying jobs with good benefits,” Rendon said. “So much emphasis is on four-year degrees [that] these careers get overlooked.”

Out of 200 graduates so far, Rendon said that 117 currently are  employed by utility companies and 99 work at PG&E.

To increase the amount of business training, Paul Seidel, president of Seidel Consulting and a former head of training services for Delta College, said colleges should spin off corporate training functions as a separate organization.

“To be successful in delivering training services to business and industry, they need to look, feel and perform like a business as opposed to a traditional academic institution,” Seidel said.

Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ontario, did just that, setting up Mohawk College Enterprises to provide education and training services to corporations and individuals in a wide variety of industries, including transportation and logistics.

“We are able to respond a lot quicker,” said Angela Granville, director of business development and marketing for MCE.

Granville said the new venture is already profitable after its first year of operation and provides training for about 80 employers.

Doug Harward, chief executive officer of Training Industry Inc. in Cary, N.C., said only about 100 of the more than 1,200 community colleges in the United States have created dedicated organizations to provide workforce development programs to corporate clients.

“In the U.S., we estimate the 2010 corporate training market to be greater than $100 billion — a big target for colleges to supplement their budgets,” Harward said in a recent blog on his website. He did not have an estimate for 2011.

“Unfortunately, success does not come easy for colleges in the highly competitive corporate market. Community colleges are not traditionally well suited to compete in this space because they’re academically oriented and not very savvy in closing business deals.

“The biggest challenge these colleges will face will be to learn how to deliver the quality of service corporations require — expectations of quality in corporate training is much higher than what the individual student taking community college courses demands.”

Another expert, Deborah Hopen, past chair of the American Society for Quality and a former vice chair of workforce development, said employers need to be willing to give students job experience.

“Many employers are reluctant to open their doors to students,” she stated in an editorial published in the June issue of the ASQ Education Division Workforce Development Brief. “The excuses range from safety and liability concerns to a just plain stubborn attitude that the educational institutions should handle these tasks. I can attest that the educational institutions always were eager to find a way to get students in the field for practical learning, but few employers were willing to get involved.”

Doug Clark, a former executive with Cargo-Master Inc., Dallas, and head of the Education Committee for the Transportation Intermediaries Association in Alexandria, Va., thinks companies have to start much earlier to capture the interest of young people in pursuing careers in transportation.

Clark works with Junior Achievement and during a recent presentation asked his students to look at the tags on their shirts to see where they were made.

“Soon they were taking off their shoes and pants to see where they came from,” he said. “From an early age, we need to make kids aware that everything they touch came on a truck somewhere.”