One of the major headaches for logistics companies in Thailand, the lack of suitably skilled labour, will be addressed with the setting up of a formal university course, a senior industry source has said.

“The challenge is how to build our own people,” Kettivit Sittisoontornwong, president of the Thai International Freight Forwarders Association (TIFFA), said.

There is also a regional angle to this, as several attendees at the recent ASEAN+6 Connectivity Symposium in Bangkok cited lack of skills a block on the industry’s development. What Thailand is doing could become a regional precedent.

“We have just made an agreement with one of our universities in Thailand to create our own curriculum that will help our association to find a new way of building human resources so we have a steady supply,” Sittisoontornwong added.

TIFFA, in collaboration with the College of Logistics & Supply Chain at Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, is to set launch a Bachelor’s of Administration in maritime business and logistics management course. This will support TIFFA membership in all kind of logistics management, Sittisoontornwong explained.

“The curriculum that we co-design with the university [will] be able to give a broad knowledge of logistics management with an emphasis on maritime business, but also cover (other) areas of the logistics industry,” Sittisoontornwong told Asia Cargo News.

Among the companies involved are leading Thai brands such as Charoen Pokphand Foods, tool and home improvement chain Power Buy, mall group Central Retail and a clump of branded international catering firms.

“We will co-design the programme with the university so that when students finish, they can work right away,” explained Sittisoontornwong.

Each class will start at 40 students and may be as large as 60. Each will have an emphasis on having a sizable minority of students from outside Bangkok. There are good reasons for this, Sittisoontornwong says, the first one being need.

While Thailand’s economy – especially exports – is weak at the moment, the country had a very successful birth control campaign in the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, the labour pool is limited, particularly following several decades of growth.

“The loss of talent in our business is a real worry,” Kevin Burrell, CEO of DHL Supply Chain’s Thailand cluster told Asia Cargo News.

Sittisoontornwong reported such basic stumbling blocks as potential recruits not turning up for interviews and those who are hired not turning up for their first (or indeed any other) day at work. There is also a high early drop-out rate from the industry, and those who were enthusiastic at first often move on after some time.

Simply put, the industry needs not only more trained staff, but also staff with a better idea about what they are getting themselves into in order to help retention. DHL has its own strategy for this, and invests significant resources in training. “We do 10 training days a year,” Burrell said. Another part of their strategy is a high internal promotion rate. “We like to keep everyone we have,” he added.

The association hopes the course will tackle many of these problems. Not only will employers pay the student, as well as the university, something like B150,000 (US$4,500) for the course, but they are also encouraged by the association to give their students allowances for travel and meals.

Students will undertake between three and three-and-a-half years of study, Sittisoontornwong told Asia Cargo News. This will break down into two or three days of classroom attendance each week and two or three days each week for on-the-job training from the company which gives the scholarship.  There is also one semester being employed in the company as an apprentice, he added.

As part of Thailand’s pitch to develop cross-border trade, the association has asked the university to deliberately recruit a portion, likely between one-fifth and one-third, from the border areas.

“Our challenge is not just to find people to work in Bangkok,” Sittisoontornwong said.

The hope is that once people from border areas are trained and have a couple of years in Bangkok under their belts, they can be relocated to their hometown areas. “If you can find work for them in their hometown, that’s better for them,” said Sittisoontornwong. And maybe better for Thai companies and Thailand, too.

By Michael Mackey

Southeast Asia Correspondent | Bangkok