Outcomes from a Certification Program for Early Career Professionals in Supply Chain Management
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Outcomes from a Certification Program for Early Career Professionals in Supply Chain Management

Published: Sep 27, 2017
Publisher: Princeton, NJ: Mathematica Policy Research
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Associated Project

Hand in Hand: Community Colleges Help Build Career Pathways for Dislocated and Low-Skilled Workers

Time frame: 2012-2017

Prepared for:

U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration

Authors

Nan Maxwell

Sarah Dolfin

Julie Bruch

Dara Lee Luca

Key Findings

More than four-fifths (82 percent) of students in five LINCS consortium colleges in 2015 were employed within the three quarters after completing their first certification track course. They had average quarterly earnings of nearly $7,400, which corresponds to an annual salary of $29,600. For the 150 students at Broward College, these outcomes represented a 3.3 percent increase in employment and 5.2 percent increase in earnings since the time they first enrolled in a LINCS course. Although both increases were statistically significant, they cannot be attributed to the LINCS program, because the estimated impacts were not statistically significant. Still, LINCS surpassed its targets for program completion (Bruch et al. 2017), exceeding the goal of its proposal: to prepare students for SCM positions. Because of time limitations, this study is not able to assess increases in employment and earnings in the longer term.

The U.S. Department of Labor TAACCCT program awarded a $24.5 million LINCS grant in supply chain management (SCM) to a consortium led by Broward College to develop and create certification track content, exams, and certifications in eight areas for early-career professionals in the SCM industry. The consortium included nine colleges that integrated content materials into traditional college courses or delivered them in short-term workshops or classes. The colleges partnered with the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, a global association for SCM, which served as subject matter experts and developed certification exams that assess knowledge in each of the eight areas. The colleges also partnered with three universities—Northwestern University, Rutgers University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology—to develop the materials to prepare students for exams in each of the certification tracks. This outcomes and impact study uses student-level data from five of the nine consortium colleges to examine students’ employment and earnings after completing a LINCS certification track course in 2015. To examine the program’s impact, the study compares outcomes for students who completed a certification track course at Broward College with those for students who took an SCM course at the college in 2014 but did not participate in LINCS.

Reference

Bruch, Julie, Scott Baumgartner, Sarah Dolfin, and Nan Maxwell. Implementation of a Certification Program in Supply Chain Management for Early Career Professionals. Princeton, NJ: Mathematica Policy Research, August 2017.

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