As economic growth moves forward, there is increasing demand for skill development in logistics sector. But that demand is exclusively linked to labour market requirements of trained manpower to fuel the economic growth that is taking place. As a result, there is increasing commercialization of higher education and increasing vocationalisation of higher education, particularly in the field of transportation and logistics. Higher education is linked to producing trained, ready-made, quickly adaptable manpower for the labour market. And this growing commercialization and growing link between higher education and labour market requirements have also commercialized both the contents and scope of graduate programs in transport and logistics. Content has become vocationalised, skill-oriented; scope has become short term, operational, and de-contextualized. As a result, the availability of skilled work force in the logistics sector is scarce, leading to improper management especially in tactical and strategic levels. The logistics sector suffers from organizational skills, lack of leadership, disjointed skills, and positions and lack of sufficient R&D activities. The most severe and immediate requirement for skill development is in the technical and middle management levels.
Moreover, we are faced with the transformation of global trade and production systems as a dominant result of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is clear that survival can not be achieved with a near-sighted, enclosed and inferior education at the threshold of this transformation. The ITU International Certificate Program in Logistics Management is designed as a program that internalizes this change.
Additionally, a crucial issue for Turkey is related to the innovation requirements brought by the 4th Industrial Revolution. A developmental connectivity emerges as an inevitable consequence of the globalization process in this direction. We have to be absolutely certain that outsiders of this connectivity will be missing the development train. ITU is one of the very few science addresses of our country which can carry Turkey into the connectivity network of innovation.
This is why ITU is the right adress to have access to the core of innovation and state-of-art research in logistics and transportation management and get prepared for the global transformation which will take place in near future.