Recruiting students to an undergraduate supply chain management program

Abstract

This study sought to utilize Six Sigma techniques to guide the design and selection of promotional materials and strategies to attract college students to an undergraduate Supply Chain Management major. Affinity Diagramming was used to collect and summarize students’ comments on what factors they considered when selecting a career. Pareto was used to prioritize their responses. Quality Function Deployment was used to align promotional materials and strategies to ensure that they addressed the factors identified by the students. Six unique promotional materials and strategies were identified as the most effective in attracting students to the Supply Chain Management major.

Keywords

Affinity Diagram Pareto Quality Function Deployment Six Sigma supply chain

Supply chain management has been identified as a major contributor in generating shareholder value by influencing a firm’s financial performance in terms of revenue, operating costs and working capital (Ellinger et al., 2011). Supply chain professionals are a critical resource of the entire chain, and many supply chain professionals, researchers and employers predict a significant shortage of supply chain talent in the near future (Holcomb et al., 2015). In a paper entitled “Supply Chain Talent Shortage: From Gap to Crisis,” 67% of the surveyed companies identified increasing demand as a significant factor in the looming shortage (Harrington, 2018). To make up that talent shortage, universities need to produce more supply chain graduates, and producing more graduates is contingent on recruiting more students to the supply chain major (Gardner et al., 2009) and ultimately to supply chain careers.

This predicted shortage in supply chain talent highlights a related issue. For at least 20 years, academicians have debated the definition of supply chain management (see LeMay et al., 2017; Mentzer et al., 2001, 2008), and the academic department in which students can study supply chain management has varied greatly, with marketing being a historically common place to house studies in the subject. Some top tier programs added “logistics” to the department name before eventually reorganizing and making supply chain management and logistics a stand-alone department (Rutner and Shepherd, 2017). A quick Google search today finds that many of the U.S. News & World Report’s top-ranked undergraduate programs are now found in departments of supply chain management. To meet the increasing demand for talent, supply chain management studies are also gaining momentum at regional US universities. This paper describes how this process took shape at one such institution: Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU).

In the fall of 2018 MTSU established a formal concentration in supply chain management. Prior to this development, the university had offered supply chain management course electives as part of the Business Management major and had a Supply Chain Student Organization. Faculty members had established relationships with several local companies employing supply chain professionals and many students had acquired supply chain related jobs with these companies. However, without a formal program, identifying “supply chain students” was a challenging task. Students might take a supply chain elective, but might not be interested in a career in the field. Likewise, students interested in supply chain as a profession might not take their electives in the field due to scheduling conflicts or general interests in another topic area. Employers also expressed concern over the lack of a formal supply chain program: recruiters often wanted to know how many supply chain students the school had, and this question could not be answered accurately. With a formal concentration, students would have an option to identify themselves as supply chain students, and employers would know exactly who the supply chain students were. Furthermore, employers would know that students in the Supply Chain Management major would have taken a predefined set of required supply chain courses, ensuring a fundamental base of knowledge, skills and abilities.

With the creation of a formal concentration, there was a need to recruit students to the new supply chain program. It can be argued that Supply Chain Management is less well known than some of the more traditional business majors like Management, Marketing, Economics and Accounting. Promotional materials (rack cards, presentations, videos) and strategies needed to be created to help promote the program. Since the supply chain concentration is a subset of the Management major, the initial target audience was existing MTSU Jones College of Business students. The task of attracting students to an academic major is not a new one; certainly, other programs have tackled this objective (Beard et al., 2010; Gardner et al., 2009; Gunn et al., 1966; Maloni et al., 2016). While student awareness of the new concentration may have been increased by viewing the website and talking with advisors and faculty members, it was clear that a critical piece of the recruiting strategy would be to better understand what makes a student select a given academic major and eventual career field. Since continuous improvement (CI) is a component of the Supply Chain Management program, and several faculty members were knowledgeable about common CI tools, a decision was made to treat the design of promotional materials and strategies like a product or process design. This approach differs from many previous attempts to attract students to a particular academic major. The supply chain faculty utilized several Lean Six Sigma tools and techniques to guide their program promotion efforts. Affinity Diagramming was used to obtain and summarize what factors influenced students’ choice of career and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) was used to ensure that promotional design elements aligned with students’ career objectives.

Methods

To determine what factors were important to students when selecting a career, several Affinity Diagramming working sessions were held. Affinity Diagrams are one of the Seven Management and Planning Tools (Juran, 1992) developed by a committee of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers in 1972 and are used to organize language data and vague concepts into specific categories or constructs. The process is a bottom-up method of creating categories and identifying natural patterns from seemingly random and chaotic data, rather than imposing categories from the top down and finding support for them (Bossert, 1991; Scholtes et al., 2003; Tague, 2005). Affinity Diagrams may be used to organize brainstorming or nominal group technique output into useful categories and as the foundation for interrelationship diagrams and cause-and-effect diagrams.

Used in conjunction with Sticky Notes, Affinity Diagrams facilitate the creative exploration, development and organization of ideas (Pyzdek, 2003). The process of sticky storming is something like the following (Bullington, 2018):

Generate ideas individually, with participants recording one idea per Sticky Note.

Place Notes on a white board or wall silently. (Add more ideas if they occur at any point.)

Huddle around the notes and organize them into clouds or groups. (If there is disagreement about which category an idea belongs in, duplicate the Sticky Note and add it to each relevant category.)

Look for possible super-groups to combine existing groups as subsets of the larger group.

Discuss.

Identify relationships between ideas and draw connecting lines between related concepts or groups.

Discuss the importance of various ideas based on the density of relationships.

Use the identified customer desirable characteristics as the rows of a QFD matrix to begin the development of the recruitment tool.

Following the Affinity Diagram process described above, 48 students in an undergraduate Key Performance Indicators course participated in the sessions, facilitated by their Supply Chain Management professor, to determine important factors influencing career choice. This activity was used to demonstrate how to develop an Affinity Diagram. Results from the Affinity Diagramming sessions were summarized and charted. The summary provided a comprehensive picture of what factors were important to students when selecting their college major. The supply chain faculty then utilized QFD as a tool to help ensure that recruiting materials and strategies addressed the key factors students cited (as organized in the Affinity Diagram) when choosing a career.

The QFD diagram is probably the best known of the Matrix Diagrams (another of the Seven Management and Planning Tools) and can be used in product or process development to relate customer perception inputs to product or process characteristics (Bossert, 1991; Cohen, 1995; Juran, 1992). In this article, the QFD matrix was used to design promotional materials targeted at college students based on their input about desirable careers. The QFD methodology provides a structured approach to identifying the customers’ most valued expectations. Technical requirements of the product or process design are then tied back to the customers’ expectations: the overarching goal is to ensure the product or process design meets those expectations.

Elements of promotional materials and strategies to recruit students to the supply chain concentration were selected based on what supply chain faculty members were already using to strengthen the relevance of their courses through strategic partnerships with local industries and advice from those strategic partners. These elements were used to demonstrate how a supply chain career would respond to the students’ important career choice factors. The purpose behind this approach was to proactively address future job satisfaction, showing that choosing the supply chain concentration would lead to a job in the supply chain field and that such a job would satisfy many of the students’ career objectives. This deliberate connection between the recruitment efforts and predicted future job satisfaction should also help with retention of students in the concentration. The promotional strategies chosen to aid in recruitment should also help to increase retention.

In academia, job satisfaction is one of the most studied employee attitudes (Spector, 1997) with numerous implications for both employees and employers, such as performance (Judge et al., 2001), retention (Chen et al., 2011; Wright and Bonett, 2007) and employee well-being (Wright and Bonett, 2007). Researchers have identified a plethora of factors that can influence job satisfaction, including job characteristics, organizational constraints, pay, work–family conflict and workload (Spector, 1997). Meier and Spector (2015: 1) categorized the antecedents of job satisfaction into three main approaches:

Dispositional—the person, including his or her personality, values, etc.

Situational—the work environment and its situational elements; and

Interactionist—the interchanges between people and the situational work environment.

Zaharee et al. (2018) studied recruitment and retention factors for early-career technical talent, which could include supply chain professionals. The sample included 306 respondents aged 22 to 35 and 92 respondents who were 36 or older and considered as later-career talent. The researchers asked respondents to identify the top three factors that kept them at their current organization and the top three reasons why they had left a job if they had changed jobs. This work is relevant to our study because (a) job satisfaction is correlated with retention, (b) our students could be considered technical talent and (c) the 22–25 age subgroup closely matches our students.

In the trade literature, global professional organizations actively study recruitment, job satisfaction and retention. The American Production and Inventory Control Society (APICS), now the Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM), in partnership with the Manufacturing Institute, commissioned a study of women in manufacturing. The factors most highly related to recruiting and retaining women in manufacturing were found to be attractive pay, challenging and interesting work, and work–life balance (Giffi et al., 2017). The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) also actively studies job satisfaction. In its report Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement: The Doors of Opportunity Are Open (SHRM, 2017), respondents rated how important certain factors were to their job satisfaction in addition to how satisfied they were with each factor. Similarly, Willis Towers Watson (WTW) conducts regular research on human resource management trends. In 2016 Global Talent Management and Rewards and Global Workforce Studies (Willis Towers Watson, 2016), WTW identified the top seven drivers of employee attraction and retention from the employee’s and the employer’s perspectives. The drivers from the employee’s view conceptually serve as predictors of job satisfaction, given the connection to retention.

For our study, we integrated the factors that respondents rated as very important (in percentages) in SHRM’s job satisfaction study, WTW’s drivers of attraction and retention (in ranking), and Zaharee et al.’s (2018) reasons for staying and reasons for leaving (in percentages) to identify themes for our students’ responses (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Existing literature themes and student themes.

Job satisfaction (SHRM, 2017). Percentage—very important	Drivers of attraction (WTW, 2016). Ranking 1–7	Drivers of retention (WTW, 2016). Ranking 1–7	Retention factors (Zaharee et al., 2018). Percentage—ranked in top 3	Reasons for leaving (Zaharee et al., 2018). Percentage—ranked in top 3	Emerging student themes
Respectful treatment of all employees at all levels (65%) Trust between employees and senior management (61%) Feeling safe in your work environment (56%) Organization’s financial stability (54%) Communication between employees and senior management (53%) Immediate supervisor’s respect for my ideas (50%) Relationship with immediate supervisor (50%)	Reputation of the organization as a great place to work (7)	Physical work environment (3) Relationship with supervisor/manager (6) Trust/confidence in senior leadership (7)	Relationships with colleagues (37%) Relationship with supervisor (28%) Organization’s ethos (16%) Physical work environment (17%) Attitude of management (15%)	Organization’s ethos (11%) Attitude of management (9%) Relationship with supervisor (2%)	Culture & Environment Company Values
Overall compensation/pay (61%) Overall benefits (56%)	Base pay and salary (1) Healthcare and wellness benefits (6)	Base pay and salary (1)	Salary and benefits (58%)	Salary and benefits (13%)	Pay & Benefits
Job security (58%)	Job security (2)	Job security (4)	—	—	—
Opportunities to use your skills and abilities in your work (56%) The work itself (51%)	Opportunities to learn new skills (5)		Professional development opportunities (52%)Work has purpose (37%)	Lack of professional development opportunities (17%)	Job Content
Career advancement (41%)	Career advancement opportunities (3)	Career advancement opportunities (2)	Advancement opportunities (26%)	Lack of advancement opportunities (13%)	Career Advancement
	Vacation and paid time off (4)	Ability to manage work-related stress (5)	Work–life balance (62%)		Work–Life balance
—	—	—	—	Location (11%)	Location
—	—	—	—	—	Travel

Results

The brainstorming portion of the Affinity Diagramming exercise produced 186 responses generated by the 48 participants. The participants then categorized individual responses into common themes. The themes identified were Pay & Benefits, Job Content, Culture & Environment, Work–Life Balance, Career Advancement, Location, Company Values and Travel. Two responses were excluded from the analysis, as they were outliers that did not fit into the identified categories: these were “Family influence” and “Having professional connections.”

The individual response data are summarized in a Pareto format by frequency of response, as well as percentage of responses (see Figure 1). Pay & Benefits was the most commonly cited factor influencing a career choice, with 58 responses (32% of responses). Job Content followed with 35 responses (19%). Culture & Environment was the next most cited factor with 29 responses (16%). The list continued in descending order with: Work–Life Balance (20; 11%), Career Advancement (16; 9%), Location (14; 8%), Company Values (8; 4%) and Travel (4; 2%).

Figure 1.

Factors that influence career choice.

Once the critical career choice factors had been identified, the designers of the supply chain promotional materials and strategies needed to incorporate design elements to address the key factors. QFD was used to organize this alignment process, as depicted in Figure 2. The factors identified by the students were treated as customer requirements or the “voice of the customer” and were placed in the left-hand column of the QFD matrix. The next column was populated with an importance rating for each factor. The importance allocated to a factor was quantified as the percentage of total comments related to it: for example, 32% of the total comments were related to Pay & Benefits, so it was given an importance rating of 32%. Promotional information and strategies were developed to include specific elements to satisfy the customer requirements.

Figure 2.

Quality Function Deployment.

Of course, the degree to which a career in supply chain satisfies students’ expectations is not actually influenced by the promotional materials. However, promotional information can be selected to highlight the characteristics of a supply chain career which students would most likely find satisfying. To guide this alignment process, elements of the promotional materials were treated as product characteristics and placed in the columns of the QFD matrix. When a promotional element was identified and placed in a matrix column, the degree to which that element satisfied each customer requirement was assessed. This relationship matrix is fundamental to the QFD process; however, it is often subjective in nature. The design team used a blank (0–5) scale to quantify each relationship. It is possible that a single design element can satisfy multiple customer requirements. Elements that provided evidence of a high degree of satisfaction for a customer requirement were given a relationship matrix score of 5 for that intersection. If design elements were related to one another, we identified that interrelationship with an intersecting star in the attic of the house. Element scores were determined by multiplying the factor weight by the element/factor relationship matrix value. This provided a weighted score for each factor, indicating how effective it was at satisfying the students’ expectations about a career.

Element scores (columns) were summed to provide an overall score. This serves as a quantitative measure of how well a design element of the promotional material satisfies student career interest. Our QFD showed that guest speakers in class, with an element score of 3.67, was the one that provided the most evidence for career satisfaction found in the supply chain field. The next most effective design element was the Chamber of Commerce’s inclusion of supply chain as one of the five high wage and high demand (element score of 2.45) career areas. Next came industry site tours, with an element score of 2.38, followed by salary survey (2.05), posting job descriptions (1.16) and local job demand data (0.32).

Discussion and implications

The results of the exercise to determine what factors influence a college student’s career choice were not shocking, but there were some interesting trends. All college students participating in the exercise were members of the College of Business, so their responses cannot be generalized to all college majors. Figure 1 represents the principal factors in career selection in a Pareto format. Although the responses do not follow a true 80/20 distribution, it is clear that a few factors dominate the responses. It may not be surprising that Pay & Benefits was the most commonly cited factor in choosing a career. Career Advancement is closely related to Pay & Benefits, but in a longer-term perspective. Furthermore, we identified Location as a related item: many students in the Middle Tennessee area stay in the region for the duration of their career (Ragland-Hudgins, 2019). Therefore, Pay & Benefits and Career Advancement are achievable only if jobs can be found in this part of the country.

This article describes how students were strategically recruited to the supply chain major. The first step was to ask prospective students what was most important to them in their career choice. Their responses yielded results that were similar to the large-scale studies conducted by SHRM (2017) and WTW (2016). More importantly, the results are consistent with those of Zaharee et al.’s (2018) study on the recruitment and retention of early-career technical employees, which included work–life balance and location as factors affecting retention. These factors did not emerge in the SHRM or WTW studies. Referring to the WTW data, Gluyas (2018) revealed that millennial workers viewed career advancement and opportunities to learn more favorably than security, which was ranked higher by older workers. Thus, it is no surprise that job security was not a priority for our students or for the early-career employees in the Zaharee et al. (2018) study.

Bring in guest speakers working in supply chain with local employers was identified as the most effective strategy to recruit students to the profession. These speakers could address every one of the factors that were important to students. Of course, their evaluation of the factor is anecdotal, as they are speaking from personal experience and not statistical data. However, several of the factors identified are not quantitative in nature (e.g., Culture & Environment, Work–Life Balance, and Company Values). Guest speakers can provide personal insights into how their careers and the companies they work for have met their expectations. Guest speakers from local companies were invited to speak in several courses targeted for supply chain recruitment—some held entry-level positions and spoke about the day-to-day activities of a supply chain professional, while others were in positions of greater responsibility and provided information about salaries, openings and key skills expected of future supply chain employees.

Another highly effective component of the supply chain promotional materials came from the Rutherford County Chamber of Commerce’s Education & Workforce Development division. After conducting surveys of local salaries and job openings, the Chamber identified five careers that had high wages and high demand in the area. These “High Five” industries are health care, manufacturing, construction, information technology and supply chain (Rutherford Works, 2014). Not only did the Chamber of Commerce’s leadership team provide statistics, and access to their promotional materials; they also spoke to high-school students, college students and college advisors about the demand for supply chain graduates in the Middle Tennessee area. The inclusion of supply chain in the High Five list sends a clear objective message to students that careers in the field are plentiful and well compensated in their local region. The Chamber’s information about the inclusion of supply chain in their High Five was included in the supply chain brochure and in a promotional video shown in an introductory course taken by all Management and Business Administration majors. This video was used to attract students to the supply chain concentration. In addition to the direct reference to supply chain management, the healthcare and manufacturing industries identified in the High Five list are heavily dependent on their internal supply chain functions and personnel to support their operations and there are significant numbers of supply chain jobs in organizations classified in these sectors. However, the inclusion of supply chain in the High Five does not necessarily support the position that a career in this field will satisfy intrinsic aspects of motivation, since most of the Chamber’s literature and promotional materials are focused on facts and figures. Salary and career opportunity data from supply chain management associations supported the Chamber’s inclusion of the profession in the High Five: a 2020 survey found the average salary for a supply chain professional with an undergraduate degree to be $78,750, which is 24% above the national average. The same study found that 88% of supply chain professionals had a positive outlook on their careers (ASCM, 2020).

Industry tours, taking students to site locations employing supply chain management professionals, was identified as a strong technique for promoting the career choice. Allowing students to experience a professional local work setting was especially supportive of the career choice factors of Culture & Environment and Location. Pay & Benefits was not typically discussed during the industry tours, as the associated presentations were more generalized than having guest speakers recount their particular career paths. It is worth noting that the ability to have supply chain professionals as guest speakers in class and to arrange site tours was contingent on the faculty having strong professional relationships with local industry representatives. Salary surveys, job postings and data on local job demand followed in terms of overall effectiveness in influencing students’ career choice. These promotional materials were primarily fact-based, so they tended to be less effective in demonstrating satisfaction levels in the intrinsic career choice factors.

Students and recent graduates should be surveyed periodically to ensure that the organization is considering the employee value proposition—the rewards, both intrinsic and extrinsic, that employees desire in exchange for their job performance (Phillips and Gully, 2015). The factors that are most important to students and early-career employees should be highlighted in recruitment materials, communications, job descriptions, job ads, etc. QFD can be used to assess the extent to which the communications and documentation are effectively highlighting the most important factors, as demonstrated in this study.

This study has implications for other academic programs that desire to recruit students and for industries and employers who may be experiencing recruiting challenges, particularly with students and early-career employees. This line of research can be extended to students outside the college, local community college students, high-school students and incoming transfer students so that promotional materials can be customized for each group.

Outcomes

The undergraduate supply chain concentration was launched in the fall of 2018. There was little opportunity for recruiting in the initial semester because the program did not appear as an official concentration until the university catalog was published in the summer. There were 18 students in the concentration during that first semester. From the fall 2018 semester on, the promotional strategies identified in this project (Supply chain guest speakers, Chamber of Commerce High Five, industry tours, salary survey, job description postings and local job demand) were used to promote the supply chain concentration to college students. The enrollment by semester increased steadily from 18 students in the fall of 2018 to 112 students in the fall of 2020, as shown in Figure 3. An internal stretch target of enrollment of 100 students by the fall of 2020 had been set when the concentration first began.

Figure 3.

Supply chain concentration enrollment.

Over a 2-year period, from 2018 to 2020, the supply chain concentration increased by 522%, making it one of the fastest growing programs in the university over that period. These numbers indicate success in attracting students, but also some level of retention. Of course, promotional materials can only promote what is actually there. Guest speakers relate their actual work experience and environment. The Chamber of Commerce places a career path in its High Five only if it is shown to have high demand and high wages, while industry tours expose students to the workplace being visited. An example of a supply chain brochure is included in Figure 4. This draws attention to the Chamber’s inclusion of supply chain in its High Five and features a picture of students visiting one of the local companies that routinely host site visits. A salary survey of supply chain jobs details the salaries for supply chain professionals, and job postings and local job demand are generated by employers. However, university programs do have the option to highlight various facts about a particular major.

Figure 4.

Supply chain management rack card.

The next steps for this supply chain concentration involve monitoring key student metrics, such as enrollment, graduation rates, internships and job placements over time to evaluate the sustainability of a potential major in supply chain. Ongoing continuous improvement will ensure that the courses being offered, and their learning outcomes, are aligned with industry needs and best practices. Relationships with organizations in the region that hire large numbers of supply chain graduates are continuing to be cultivated, as are community partnerships with chambers of commerce, trade organizations, etc.

Recommendations

Increasing enrollment in an existing program or creating a new program is no small undertaking. Higher education institutions should assess how well their program offerings are matching up with career projections and student placements. Adjustments should be made when programs are not successfully placing most of their graduates in the career field they have studied. These programs should review the curriculum to ensure alignment with industry needs and evaluate the effectiveness of their strategic partnerships with regional employers and other organizations, such as chambers of commerce and professional associations. These relationships are valuable both when a program is shrinking and needs to change and when a program is growing rapidly. When the demand for graduates is greater than the enrollment can produce, institutions should consider using a tool like QFD to identify the most crucial factors for students’ current needs and wants and future job satisfaction. Soliciting feedback from students concerning the factors that are most important to them when choosing a career and developing promotional activities that highlight those factors, while also incorporating relevant aspects of job satisfaction and retention, can lead students to choose academic majors that will satisfy their needs and wants for many years to come.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Cliff Welborn

Kristie Abston

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