On a bi-annual basis, the World Bank assesses countries’ logistics performance against a set of six criteria.  One of these criteria is ‘quality and competence’.  This is influenced by the competence of the national workforce to plan, manage and execute logistics operations. In recent years, anecdotal and survey evidence has been accumulating to suggest that there is a shortage of logistic skills in particular countries.   Following the publication of its 2014 Logistics Performance Indicator report, the World Bank commissioned KLU to undertake a global study of the nature and extent of the logistics skills shortage.  This involved reviewing existing literature and data on the subject and conducting both an online questionnaire survey and a series of roughly 40 interviews with specialists in this field around the world. The final report of the study, published in August 2016, confirmed that there logistics skills were in short supply both across the occupational hierarchy from operative to executive and in both the developing and developed world.  The report, which I co-authored with Dr. Christophe Floethmann and Professor Kai Hoberg of KLU and Christina Busch (now Wiederer) of the World Bank, discusses the causes of the problem and offers a series of recommendations to governments and other stakeholders on how it can be alleviated. 

 A copy of this report can be downloaded free from the World Bank website

 A short summary of this project was published in Focus on Logistics and Transport, the magazine of the UK Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport in November 2016.   It can be downloaded here.

I also wrote the introductory message in a theme issue of this magazine on logistics skills in November 2018:

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