On the eve of National Skills Week, the Accreditation Body for Supply Chain Management, Australasian Supply Chain Institute (ASCI), has announced an Instructor Development Program aimed at standardising supply chain management knowledge in Australia to address a skills shortage of two million by 2025.*  

The Instructor Development Program is a capacity building program for ASCI’s APICS alumni community to endorse them as instructors in best practice supply chain management knowledge based on ASCI’s Supply Chain Management Body of Knowledge, which draws from global certification partners including APICS.

According to ASCI President, Alexandra Riha, the program is a sustainable way to address skills gaps in the supply chain community and draw from the expertise of our alumni community.

“Supply chain management is a fairly new discipline and so, it includes many practitioners who have come from other disciplines resulting in an inconsistent delivery of best practice knowledge.  As a result, skills are overweighted in technology and data, but are limited in applying key learnings from data,” she said.  

By 2025, there will be a shortage of two million workers across the supply chain, and that doesn’t include any issues around the current disruption due to COVID-19.

“As we bring in the next generation of supply chain practitioners, and indeed encourage career changes for those in other disciplines to join supply chain to help fill the skills shortages, it’s our responsibility to ensure that this generation can pass on best practice knowledge.

However, despite the forecasted skills shortage, Ms Riha is optimistic for the future.

“Since the 1960s, we’ve trained over 130,000 supply chain practitioner around the world in APICS certification and, in Australia, we have over 600 alumni that are eligible to join ASCI’s Instructor Development Program. Now is the time to empower our supply chain leaders to impart their knowledge,” she says.

Benefits to the Instructor

• Specialist educator within the organisation, industry or industry body
• Option to continue to Master Instructor
• ·Gain a profile within the supply chain community

Benefits for the organisation 

• Succession planning
• Mitigating risk
• Business continuity 

Benefits to the individual

• Understanding of the interactions and inter-dependencies across business functions with 4,000+ standard supply chain terms
• Build the skill to provide insights into how the various pieces work together and what tools, approaches, technologies and measurements support and encourage achievement of supply chain objectives
• Commence pathway to Registered Practitioner under the ASCI Professional Accreditation Scheme

For more information about the Instructor Development Program, the upcoming Train the Trainer courses and the global certifications that make up the ASCI Supply Chain Management Body of Knowledge, contact ASCI National Office.

*  Industry study by the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte Consulting LLP