Canadian International Freight Forwarders Association partners with Schulich ExecEd

Partnering with institutions of higher learning to deliver educational programs is nothing new for the Canadian International Freight Forwarders Association. For years, CIFFA has worked with community colleges, such as Seneca College in Ontario, Brighton College in BC, and Eastern College in the Maritimes, to deliver programs in international trade, business, and logistics.

This spring CIFFA took its partnerships to another level by launching a series of intensive three-day programs with a major Canadian university. CIFFA announced a partnership with York University’s Schulich ExecEd, a unit of York’s Schulich School of Business,that would begin with three three-day programs aimed at senior managers or potential senior managers in freight forwarding. The first of those programs — Sales Strategy for Non-sales Managers — took place in May at York University’s Keele campus and attracted about a dozen students, said Stephen McDermott, CIFFA’s director of education.

“The feedback we got from all students was that it was a really excellent experience,” McDermott said. Both McDermott and CIFFA Executive Director Ruth Snowden took the course, which was an opportunity for them to enhance their own freight-forwarding education. “And there is the possibility that I might teach the program moving forward,” Dermott said.

The second program — What the Non-Financial Manager Needs to Know about Financial and Managerial Accounting — was scheduled for June 21-23, and the third — Building a Strong Customer Service Culture for Your Organization — is set for July 19-23. CIFFA is also making plans to offer the programs again in November, also at Schulich’s Executive Learning Centre on the Keele campus.

The next stage after that is to offer the programs in Vancouver and Montreal, likely beginning in 2017. CIFFA is also exploring the option of presenting the programs as webinars. “The overall goal for us is to have more and more professional freight forwarders in the industry, people who when you see the PFF designation you know that those individuals are the tops of their career,” McDermott said.

Taking the executive programs will now become a requirement for the CIFFA professional freight forwarder designation. The programs don’t have any pre-requisites; however they are “recommended for managers or those who are designated for development into a management role,” McDermott said.

CIFFA’s college partnerships programs are aimed at more practical education, he said. And they either include the writing of exams that lead to a CIFFA certificate or a CIFFA advanced certificate — or prepare the students to take those exams. “The graduates are potentially future freight forwarders in a wide variety of competencies,” he said.

Unlike the CIFFA certificate courses, the executive programs do not have exams. However, students are required to work on a group project and make a presentation to the class at the end of the three days. In the sales course, for example, that project involved creating a sales plan. “It’s also great, even for those who don’t create sales plans, just to understand the process so they know how it comes about,” McDermott said.

At the end of the program, students receive a certificate of completion. Since McDermott joined CIFFA five years ago, its board of directors has discussed what might be the next step for the association in educating managers, he said. “We wanted to bring something that was academically valuable to our industry of managers and executives, to be able to take something that they could develop and they could actually change the cultures of their organizations for the better,” McDermott said. The financial program for non-financial managers, for example, would benefit sales executives who are good at traditional sales skills such as relationship building, sales methodologies and the focus on closing, but don’t know much about reading financial statements. “If you can look at your own profit and loss (statement) and be able to interpret where the needs of the business are internally and for your client, you can create sales plans based on that,” Dermott said. “So you can do effective account management.”

Development of the program had its genesis in a survey that CIFFA did of its membership to determine which competencies or skills sets companies found lacking in the management training. CIFFA narrowed that list down to a few topics, such as sales for non-sales managers, client services, improving the customer service culture, and finances for non-financial managers. “And then from there we just went looking at different offerings that were on the market and started a conversation with the Schulich School of Business,” McDermott said. “They had existing programs that really hit all of the buttons.”

Alan Middleton, executive director of the Schulich ExecEd in the Schulich School of Business, said the centre has for a long time had “a fairly chunky business in supply chain management” under the leadership of Program Director Mark Thomas, who made the initial contact with CIFFA. Part of the approximately 18-month process to tailor the existing programs for CIFFA was an automatic needs analysis, Middleton said. “We don’t just jam established products into organizations,” he said. “So, part of the time was spent getting to know what was going to be important and what kind of learning was required by the association for its members.”

In many cases, the instructors of the CIFFA-tailored programs are the same ones who instruct the existing Schulich ExecEd courses. They include Sanjay J. Dhebar, who Middleton described as “a superstar” and who teaches the CIFFA program on sales strategies for non-sales managers as well as the customer service program. Dhebar holds an MBA, has a management background in health-care companies and previously worked at a Toronto advertising agency.

The instructor of Schulich’s other CIFFA program on financial management is Dom Cianflone, whose credentials include fellowships as a Chartered Professional Accountant and Certified Management Accountant. In future, CIFFA expects also to train its own instructors through the Schulich ExecEd as part of its licensing agreement, Middleton confirmed.

Middleton said the centre is happy to see CIFFA committing itself to increasing the skills sets of its members. “We still have too much an attitude that education comes early in life and the rest of the time it’s experience,” he said. “These days you’ve got to upgrade your skills with great frequency and I’m delighted to see CIFFA joining this.”

This article was originally published in Canadian Sailings: Transportation & Trade Logistics, Canada’s weekly trade and transportation magazine.