If you want to know what going back to college and taking a degree (or certificate) program in supply-chain management can do for advancing a career, just ask Andre C. Winters, vice president of Business Development with Magno International, a third-party logistics company headquartered in Doral, Florida.

When Winters started out in the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business’ Master of Science in Global Supply Chain Management program in August 2014, he was with a different company and hoping to boost his career prospects. He hadn’t even finished the program when Magno approached him about a job. The company’s interest was cinched by learning he was getting his master’s in supply chain.

“I was being recruited through a referral, and my future boss looked at my LinkedIn profile,” Winters says. “One of his first questions was about the USC program. I walked him through it, some of the things I’ve learned, how it changed my perspective. It drove a lot of conversation around what Magno wants to do as a company, how I could be positioned to help transition the business.”

Why did a guy living and working full-time in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area choose a degree program in far-off Los Angeles?

“I was looking for school branding and reputation,” he says. “I was looking at cost, which was a variable because I wanted to make sure I got to the right program. Flexibility, meaning it was an online program with limited on-campus requirements. I also considered the alumni base and its activity, as well as connectivity. The last thing, which was really a key decision maker, was that I’m originally from Northern California. I grew up a USC fan. I said, ‘Hold on there. I get to check the box on one, two, three and four. And I always wanted to be a Trojan!”

Winters says he thinks back often to how impactful his pursuit of higher education was on his future boss during the recruitment process. “In August of 2014, I was probably more of a transportation-driven solutions seller, if you want to call it that, as opposed to now,” he says. “I’ve got a bigger holistic approach to the supply chain. I can talk intelligently now about manufacturing process versus where I was when I started the program.”

Finding examples of supply-chain executives and managers who have seen immediate benefits from going to back to school for degrees or certificates is pretty easy; they’re all around us.

In the past decade, particularly as schools have been able to offer programs online, these executive-degree and certificate programs have become very important for colleges and universities because they offer an opportunity for students to expand their horizons without giving up their careers and home lives.

“The companies can use these as retention opportunities,” says Joel Dupuis, executive education key account director for the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. “Or they can be a recruitment tool to say, ‘We’re investing in you, we want you in this program, we see you as a future leader. Please be in this program.’”

Dupuis says ASU sees two types of supply chain executives and managers sign up for its programs. “We have those who are newer to a supply chain role,” he says. “Maybe they’ve been out of school for a couple of years, but they now need to start expanding their knowledge. Maybe they have a degree in engineering or finance, but they need to understand the function. What we’ve also seen over the last couple of years are individuals who have been in industry for 10, 15 years and need to refresh their perspective.”

Tom Moyer, 29, has already spent 11 years working for Tyndale USA, a clothing manufacturer based in Pipersville, Pennsylvania. The company makes OSHA-compliant, fire-resistant clothing for electrical utilities, and oil and gas workers. To date, Moyer—Tyndale’s transportation manager—has taken operations-oriented supply chain management certificate sessions at the Penn State University World Campus’ Smeal College of Business, including forecasting and inventory management, fulfillment operations management, transportation and operations, and supply chain analytics.

His pathway has been a little unusual. He was the company’s shipping manager before being promoted to overseeing transportation, which corresponded with the company opening a distribution center far from Pipersville—in Houston. His boss suggested he could go further with a better understanding of operations.

“Both my boss and my boss’ boss went to Penn State,” Moyer says. “They knew there was an executive program there. And since I’m from Pennsylvania and I root for the Nittany Lions, I thought it was a great idea, too.”

It didn’t hurt, he says, that the company paid for his education.

Eric Carlson, who describes himself as “a budding supply chain professional,” realized five years ago that the one thing that most of his jobs always had in common was the supply chain.

“Whether it was advertising, marketing or just driving trucks in college, I really enjoyed supply chain,” says the Greater Boston resident. “I chose the Northeastern University D’Amore-McKim School of Business’ program for a couple of reasons. One is that Northeastern has a big push to keep—or to bring in—people from the professional world. It’s not just students who’ve completed their bachelor degree and go on to get a master’s in Supply Chain, or certificate. They see value in having people with a few years under their belts coming into the classroom and being able to offer real world examples as to what the professor is speaking about.”

When he began taking courses, Carlson saw an opportunity to move from the advertising department at Stop & Shop to the sourcing department as an analyst for the supermarket chain’s private label brands. After several years in that position he is now seeking “a true supply chain job—analyst, coordinator or leader,” he says. “I’m finding this certificate is doing a lot to open doors for me that normally would be closed because it shows initiative on my part.”

Carlson says that he worked on a semester-long group project that was focused on Stop & Shop’s own supply chain.

“Not only did I learn more about the grocery supply chain, I learned about my own company,” he says, “and we provided a few suggestions for recruitment to the director.”

Unlike a lot of classes, the ones Carlson took in supply chain at Northeastern were more than practical. “I can remember a time the professor asked, ‘What percentage of safety stock should you maintain in order to protect your business?’ And somebody who was clearly very young raised their hand, ‘Well the book says it’s “X” percent.’ And the older folks, including myself, had a chuckle. The answer is, ‘It’s whatever you need to make sure you’re never out of stock. Because the first time you’re out of stock, you can explain why you are. And the second time, you’re looking for a job.’”

He says that the school has been supportive of him post-certificate as well, making introductions and guiding his current job search. “It’s a good extended community to be a part of,” according to Carlson. 

At 39, Brad Liddie’s interest in going back to school and expanding his advancement opportunities at Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Kenco neatly aligned with his employer’s new training partnership with the University of Tennessee-Knoxville (UTK).

“It had been a number of years that I’d been out of school,” says Liddie, who has been with Kenco since 2001 and is currently VP of Operations, “and I recently went through APICS certification for supply chain leadership. I think I may have been at the right place at the right time and I got a ton of support from my company to be able to do that.”

In addition to his job, Liddie—a Marine Corps veteran—balanced going back to school against the demands of home, his wife and two children.

“I felt like I had a really good support system on both sides,” he says. “My mentor at work encouraged me to invest in myself. And the same goes for my wife and kids. My wife made a number of sacrifices so that I could focus on study or travel that was required for school. Without her support, it wouldn’t have been possible.”

Liddie, Kenco and UTK are part of the evolution of modern executive MBA and certification programs that use combinations of night, end-of-the-week, and/or online classes to provide access to enhanced skills and knowledge to more men and women already ensconced in corporate America.

Many employees in logistics and manufacturing can be sent back to school, concurrently with their career, to master a given skill set. Education leaders at UTK, Florida State University in Tallahassee and Arizona State University spoke to Global Trade about how they work with executive students and employers to make the return to school as fluid, cost- and time-effective as possible for all parties.

Some CEOs don’t realize what’s available to them, or perhaps they know about the programs but have hesitations. In most cases, these situations are really a win-win: The student can advance his or her education and career (often with financial support provided by the employer), and the employer can gain great value from the employee. In some cases, through student projects and such, the employees will take on a challenge with the help of instructors and bring an immediate dollar value back to the company.

At UTK, Liddie’s course of study required two weeks on-site every quarter—sometimes in Knoxville, once in Europe, once in Asia. The rest of his study experience was online, giving him great flexibility in balancing the demands of work, home and school.

Larry Giunipero is the Tom Petrillo Term Professor of Supply Chain Management and director of the Global Supply Chain Management Center at Florida State University.

Classes in FSU’s online executive masters program focus on upstream and downstream supply chain management and include: Global Strategy; Purchasing and Supply Chain; Operations Management; Logistics and Supply Chain; and Business-to-Business Marketing.

“The online MBAs are mostly employed, doing the balancing act,” Giunipero says. “The full-timers, of course, have to take a sabbatical from work or they just withdraw from their current employer. Perhaps they go back, or perhaps find other opportunities.”
Which, obviously, is a reason some employers blanched at funding the traditional executive MBA model. Why should a company pay for a top executive or mid-level manager to take a year off and go back to school with no guarantee of a return on investment?

That’s exactly the issue that modern executive MBA and certificate programs have been reconfigured to combat.

“One of the benefits of online is you don’t have to show up at 8 a.m. for a class because you’ve got the flexibility to take it within the parameters that the instructor sets for the course,” Giuinpero says.
Some universities and colleges offer hybrid programs wherein students come to campus for a week or a weekend to complete certain assignments or attend special lectures. How long it takes to complete an executive degree or certificate program largely rests with the student, who might take one class per semester or as many as two or three.

Arizona State University recently absorbed the Thunderbird School of Global Management. As a result, in development for Fall 2016 at ASU is an online global trade and commerce certificate program with a substantial logistics segment.

“It will have a separate course on the politics of alliances, how you do a trade alliance, whether you should be in NAFTA, Trans-Pacific, all those kinds of things,” says Arnold Maltz, associate professor of Supply Chain Management and director of the Master of Science in Global Logistics program at ASU. “It will have my class, which is strictly on emerging markets and how you actually do business and trade in emerging markets, especially emphasizing the physical distribution side of it. It will also have electives that could be anything from overseas assignments and overseas projects, which Thunderbird has done for many, many years, to cultural awareness.”

There are executive MBA candidates who represent high potential or key talent to their employers. They have deep experience in a particular area of business—maybe as a plant manager, director of procurement, distribution or transportation operations. Or maybe they’ve been in project management and strategy, but they haven’t necessarily had the experience or the breadth across the organization to be able to put things together in how a supply chain can deliver value to the business.

“That’s the type of student that we’ve targeted for our supply chain management program,” according to Shay D. Scott, managing director of the Global Supply Chain Institute at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. “We designed our program from the ground up with that in mind. It’s an 11-month program; starts in January, ends in December. We tinkered with different program lengths and zeroed in on the one-year timeframe as deep enough that you can get a transformative experience, but not so long that you keel over and are in a ditch before you graduate.”

Scott notes that while supply chain management is male-dominated, UTK’s 2016 incoming class is 55 percent female, “because the companies are selecting key female talent to diversify their leadership ranks. It’s a great thing for the supply chain.”

Donna Deason earned a bachelors degree in chemical engineering and hadn’t been in a classroom in more than two decades when she committed herself to earning an executive MBA from UTK in 2015.

“It’s going well for me,” says the global business director for Eastman Chemical Co. in Kingsport, Tennessee. “I took the time upfront to make sure that, one, I was committed and I was going to be positive about the experience; and, two, that I would find a program that really fit my needs, because not all MBA or Executive MBA programs are the same.”

Deason says Eastman Chemical sees the benefit in continuing education. “They’re very happy to look for corporate funding for these types of things so you don’t also have the emotional stress of paying for it out of your own pocket, as many of my peers in this program have done,” she says. “I was blessed to have corporate funding and the backing that said, ‘You don’t have to take vacation when you’re away on these courses and class time. Work it into your business role. Get your business job done.’ They were very supportive.”

Mary Curran is a costumer/buyer in Creative Costuming at the Walt Disney Co. in Orlando, Florida, a management-level position that includes elements of global undertaking because many of the costumes that her department makes go out to Disney parks around the world. She is currently in the fourth of seven semesters in FSU’s online executive masters program.

“About five years into my career here, I had become a full-time manager,” she says. “I’d had some really great opportunities to travel worldwide for the company. It’s a company where turnover in upper-level management jobs is very low. People love them and hold onto them as much as they can. Toward my fifth year, a lot of people I worked with were getting ready to retire. So I figured that I would go back to school.”

Fortunately for her, Disney offers an extremely generous tuition reimbursement program, one that took a great deal of stress out of the decision to keep working while expanding her global knowledge.

“My role at Disney involves some supply chain aspects,” Curran explains. “As a buyer, we do purchase ordering, vendor selection and vendor score cards. Learning the supply chain material has been beneficial for me because it explains why we do a lot of the things we do.”

Is it possible to quantify the value of a company investing in an executive MBA for a single employee?
UTK’s Scott says yes.

“On average,” he says, “our students return $6.5 million in savings or incremental revenue growth back to their company on a three-year basis. That’s actually, for some of the students, a tiny number. We had a student that accomplished a project that was valued at over $100 million. And we’ve had some that are smaller. It’s not always necessarily about the direct dollar savings, but it’s a win-win.”