Logistics management: modern educational patterns in economic universities and management schools
In the modern world, a logistician is a recognized, internationally renowned, and well-paid profession. A highly educated, top-class specialist in the field of logistics management finds employment not only in their own country but also abroad, where logistics is known and applied in practice. As a result of the development of education in this discipline, logisticians educated in Poland will soon have such opportunities. Already, many graduates of Polish universities who specialized in logistics are pursuing fast professional careers in their field.
In the logistics education system in Poland, which has only been taking shape for a few years, two basic phenomena can be observed:
1) A clear split into two, essentially independent, educational subsystems:
• an education system in technical universities, mainly in the fields of: transport, production management and organization, and computer science;
• an education system in the field of logistics for business needs in economic universities and at university economics departments.
2) The dissemination of “logistics knowledge” regarding so-called Business Logistics by randomly retrained staff, i.e., so-called training the trainers.
In the first case, education is based on a natural division of knowledge into an engineering part and a business-related part. Technical universities should prepare engineering staff for the logistics profession, whose main domain should be production logistics (system designers, operations managers), transport, and warehouse management. However, in some technical universities, highly sought-after technical and engineering knowledge in the field of logistics, such as concurrent engineering, applied systems analysis, or information systems management, is not being disseminated. Due to a misunderstood market trend and to the detriment of popularizing technical knowledge, only elements of business logistics are taught there, for which technical universities are de facto not intended, both due to their educational profiles and the qualifications of the teaching staff. This does not mean that knowledge of business logistics is not important in the general education of engineers. However, it cannot be limited to it and cannot be taught by randomly retrained engineering staff. A similar misunderstanding would be the practice of technical sciences by unprepared and incompetent economists.
There are also concerns about the teaching of logistics by graduates of short training courses. In such a short time, one cannot acquire the qualifications or skills of a logistics teacher, let alone a qualified manager. This phenomenon would not be worth noting if not for its harmfulness to the logistics education system currently developing in Poland and the lack of ability to verify teachers and trained course participants. In recent years, the situation in logistics teaching has become more difficult because logistics management itself has also become more difficult. Although the logistics education system in higher education institutions is only just beginning to take shape, the need for its further modification is already visible today. This requires an understanding of the essence of the matter by the teachers themselves, and above all – a reform of the way logistics is taught in the face of global changes in this field.