HEBRON, Ky. — High school students in northern Kentucky got an up close look at a career in supply chain management, a field with a growing need for skilled workers.
Isabella Gay was one of about 38 high school students taking part in Northern Kentucky University’s supply chain boot camp. The final stop of the week-long program was touring Verst Logistics, an e-commerce fulfillment facility in Hebron. Students learned the ins and outs of systems that affect everyone.
“I just wanted to see experience and what it’s like to work in a factory, to work in management in a factory, and just see all the different types of jobs that are available outside of the specific things that I want to do in my mind as a dream job,” Gay said.
Mark Thackeray, director of the Global Supply Chain Management degree program at NKU, designed the boot camp. He said he wanted to give students a better understanding of what the supply chain is, and what it isn’t.
“We have 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. But supply chain management is much bigger. It’s a business optimization approach to all of the different entities that exist within our supply chains,” Thackeray said.
Throughout the boot camp, students learned about planning and scheduling, sourcing materials, making products and distribution, processes that impact everyday shoppers.
Verst Vice President of Fulfillment Operations Jason Mess said the facility shipped 32 million units last year alone.
“You ordered that box of cereal and it was picked and it was just placed in a box and shipped to me, and that was it. There is so much that goes into it,” Mess said. “What we can do in the future with this, there’s no end in sight. There’s no growth potential stop that you see at the end of the horizon. It can go as far as we want to take it.”
Thackeray said northern Kentucky is a hotbed for supply chain jobs, which is why NKU wants to create a talent pipeline. The program also incorporates lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that still affect the economy today.
“There is risk in our supply chains. There’s supply chain disruption that happens. Businesses learned a lot of important lessons from covid. But we actually teach our students even in the boot camp the concepts of how to stay resilient, how to stay agile, how to be able to use data analytics to pivot your supply chains when needed so that you can avoid that disruption through risk mitigation as much as possible,” he said.
It was a lot for Gay to absorb over the course of the week, but she said she was glad she signed up.
“Just being here today is amazing. It really shows you what life is outside of high school. The future’s never certain, and to experience as many things as physically possible,” she said. “I think I can envision myself going into something on the management side of this more than I can the factory side, mainly because I can’t lift heavy things.”
Thackeray said NKU’s Global Supply Chain Management degree program has had almost 150 graduates since it started seven years ago. He said almost all of them have had at least one job offer upon graduation.
