Local colleges help Hampton Roads
meet maritime work-force needs
by Doug Childers
Virginia Business
May 2007
Old Dominion University student Will Fediw was reading the local newspaper last year when a headline grabbed his attention. ODU would be offering a new undergraduate degree in maritime and supply-chain management. The third-year marketing major was hooked.
The region’s robust maritime industry would mean a bright future. “I knew there would be more money and opportunities locally in Hampton Roads,” says Fediw, who soon switched his major. “I was lucky to have taken enough classes to slide right into it.”
Now the Portsmouth native is on track to become one of the program’s first graduates in December.
The ODU program is one of two new maritime education programs created in the Hampton Roads region to ensure that the area’s booming maritime industry will be able to meet the growing demand for trained tehnicians and specialists. The other is at Tidewater Community College.
The ODU undergraduate program grew out of the university’s Maritime Institute, which began offering classes at the graduate level 13 years ago. Like students in the graduate program, ODU undergraduates majoring in maritime and supply-chain management take four core classes in international shipping, shipping management, port management and supply-chain management and logistics.
Sara Russell, an instructor in the program, says its goal is simple: to prepare students “for the jobs they’ll see — in logistics, warehousing and distribution centers, trucks and the railroads as well as ship lines.”
ODU’s maritime and supply-chain management program is the only one of its kind on the East Coast. Texas A&M University at Galveston has a similar program.
Students who graduate from the maritime and supply-chain management program receive a bachelor’s degree in business administration.
Several companies are partnering with ODU on the program. Among them are Virginia International Terminals, APM Terminals, Norfolk Southern Corp. and MeadWestvaco Corp. Fediw has an internship with Norfolk International Terminals, one of the three terminals in Hampton Roads that comprise the Port of Virginia, and another student is interning at Inchcape Shipping Services, a marine management services provider. This summer, several students will begin internships at APM Terminals’ new Portsmouth facility.
The partnership is mutually beneficial because companies hiring the program’s graduates “will have an intelligent work force,” Russell says. “Students are coming on board with a deep understanding” of subjects such as logistics and documentation. “We are providing students with an in-depth understanding of international trade and its importance in our global economy. So it will reduce their training costs.”
Tidewater Community College announced the creation of a maritime education program last May. The Maritime and Transportation Center, which is on the Portsmouth campus, serves a central role in the college’s effort to enhance communication between academia and the private sector. “We’re trying to pull all the wide variety of programs we already do into one area administratively, so we have one point of contact,” says Terry Jones, provost of the Portsmouth campus. “It’s a clearinghouse, of sorts.”
The community college also is using a $165,000 planning grant from the National Science Foundation to share curricula with other colleges and universities, such as Florida Community College in Jacksonville.
To date, the center has about 30 partners, including businesses such as Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems, as well as universities like ODU. Students receiving associate’s degrees in business can transfer to ODU’s maritime and supply-chain management program, for instance.
In addition to sharing curricula with other colleges and universities, Jones says, the Maritime and Transportation Center seeks to act as a middleman for standardizing workers’ skill sets for competing shipyards that normally don’t share that information. “So it wouldn’t matter which company the student works for because the basic core skills set would be there, based on industry standards,” he says.
The ultimate goal is to have the information posted on a Web site to foster communication between businesses and colleges about the training needs of the industry.
That model fits the center’s overall purpose, Jones says. “Businesses tell us their needs, and we try to develop the training that will meet those needs. We want this center to become a place where people in the maritime industry will turn to in order to obtain their skilled work force.”
With his own graduation approaching, ODU’s Fediw says he would like to get a job in maritime safety and inspection. And even if he has to leave the Hampton Roads area to do that, he plans on returning to the area. “Hampton Roads is set to be the largest hub for maritime activity in the years to come. The money is here, the opportunities are here, and everything I know is here. This is where I grew up. You could say I’m giving back to the region that raised me.”
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