National career tech conference heads to Patterson to see model logistics program

A national conference on career courses tied to streamlining workflows, storing inventory and shlepping stuff came to Patterson this week. Organizers said they chose the site to showcase a model program being developed at Patterson High.

“They have one of the most sophisticated programs in the country,” said Daniel Stanton, vice president of education and workforce development for MHI, the material handling industry association.

Patterson’s programs stands out, he said, because it brings together all the pieces. The PHS business logistics program gives its students basic warehouse entry skills. The school worked with the city of Patterson to help attract warehouse businesses – with employers to tailor the high school program to available jobs, and with Modesto Junior College to line up classes with MJC career certificate and associate degree programs.

“They recognized this need in the community. Patterson had everything it needed to have a supply chain cluster. It had space. It had location (near Interstate 5). And now it has workers. What you need to have to really fuel that (development) is the workforce,” Stanton said. The high school is building that bridge, he said.

“It’s recruiting students and building relationships with industries. Everybody in the country is getting lessons from Patterson in how to do that well,” Stanton said between sessions Tuesday at the MHI Career Technical Education Educators Summit.

The industry recognized the need to develop its workforce years ago and helps support high school and college programs by developing curriculum and providing equipment or grants, said speaker Angela Jenkins, MHI education coordinator.

“That is what we are here for. You are educating our future,” Jenkins told the 38 instructors and school administrators from eight states gathered at the Patterson Joint Unified School District offices.

The three-day conference showcased a number of existing programs, sharing what they had learned and answering questions for schools looking at adding such courses.

Jim Andersen, dean of career technical education at Merced College, came to get ideas for lining up material handling and logistics courses with business classes the community college already offers to create a kind of academic career ladder.

“What I’m talking about is stack-able credentials,” Andersen told the group.

But the community college approach, mixing hands-on practical knowledge with academic training, needs to be valued by industry employers, said Soledad McCarthy of Skyline College in San Bruno. University students seem to be preferred, she said.

“They’re beating out all our students for jobs. Those universities are training managers, but they have no idea what goes on out on the floor,” McCarthy said.

Skyline’s program partners with Goodwill Industries, training Goodwill clients in basic academic skills as well as job skills to run the San Francisco facility storing, repairing and shipping out donated goods. The clients/students earn certificates in things like running a forklift that qualify them for jobs at storage facilities anywhere.

The program is part of Skyline’s Career Advancement Academy, which includes counselors with special training for low-income adult issues, tutoring embedded into classes, financial counseling and a cohort system, meaning a group of adults stay together in classes throughout the program.

“It’s not enough to have a student be in a college classroom. It’s a new and complex system they’re in at college,” she said.

On the Goodwill side, Director Brian Otto said industry partnering with education makes sense. “Involving employers in the process means at the end of the day, they’re going to hire (the students), and that’s what we’re going for,” Otto said.

Patterson Unified Superintendent Phil Alfano has made inviting in employers a priority. The district’s large event center is available to employers for career fairs. It created a business advisory panel for its business logistics program.

The Patterson program has gone from learning to ship free books out of an 800-square-foot facility to planning for an on-campus 10,000-square-foot logistics center expected to be ready for classes in October.

The program works to keep businesses engaged, which sometimes means working on their schedule instead of the school day, said Patterson High instructor James Toste.

He asks area plants and warehouses for classroom speakers and to give high school kids tours of their facilities. “I never, ever ask them for money. I won’t do it,” he told the group, adding involved businesses often volunteer to give things.

Dave Finley’s advice was to make sure to budget time well when mixing in real-world projects. Finley folds school club volunteers into his “Back the Pack” program in Rock Hill, S.C., bringing in manpower to bag Friday food packets for poor kids to eat over the weekend.

“You get caught up in production, and instruction can’t keep up. It can’t all be loading pallets,” Finley told the group during one session.

Loading pallets is the least of where careers can start, said conference speakers. The industry calls it a supply chain, which covers the logistics of how money and information flow, as well as the boxes and pallets flowing from Amazon’s fulfillment center and the Granger Distribution Center.

“Everything that we take for granted, everything that makes civilization possible,” Stanton said, comes down to logistics and supply chains. That takes manual lifting and other unskilled labor, but increasingly it takes workers who can work – and even more critically, repair – the complex robotic systems used in cutting edge warehouses.

Take the much-hyped Amazon sales event. “It’s great to have huge sales for Amazon Prime Day, but how do you get all that product out to the customers? If that doesn’t arrive (on time), then you’ve got a real problem,” he said.

This story was originally published July 23, 2015 at 7:11 PM with the headline "National career tech conference heads to Patterson to see model logistics program."