Date: 03-30-2017
UPS recruits rural high school students with tour of Worldport
About a dozen high school students from Lewis County, Kentucky, stood along a railing to gaze down four stories of conveyor belts that carried UPS packages under the watchful red eyes of label scanners.
UPS Customer Relations Specialist Jeff O’Dell, who led the tour on Tuesday, dazzled the students with impressive statistics about the operation: It covers 5.2 million square feet, contains 155 miles of belts and 8,800 miles of fiber optic cables.
UPS started the tours this year to familiarize high school students with potential careers its Louisville hub. Like many other companies, the logistics giant is fighting a tight labor market and taking unusual steps to encourage more young potential employees to consider a career in logistics.
The tours are part of the UPS Kentucky LOOP program, which offers students living outside of Louisville and adjacent counties, two years of housing assistance of $325 per month, tuition at Jefferson Community Technical College and a part-time job at UPS that pays $10.20 an hour.
Students stood on a catwalk as conveyors delivered small packages to slides, from which UPS employees moved them, label side up, onto individual tilt trays. The trays carried the packages under a scanner, from where a computer would determine when the trays had to be tilted to deposit their cargo in nearby bags. UPS Worldport includes 18,000 tilt trays, more than any other facility in the world.
“Crazy how it works,” said Lewis County High School senior Tristan K. Corns, 17, as he stepped out of the small package sorting area.
Corns will graduate May 19 and is still weighing his options. He likes numbers and math — his classmates call him a human calculator — and he may attend community college and eventually Morehead State to get a degree in accounting.
However, the LOOP (Living Options and Opportunities Path) program’s housing and tuition help sound enticing, he said, and the job seems interesting, too, especially driving the trucks that load the UPS planes.
Summer Bryant, a counseling coordinator at Morehead State who chaperoned the students, said that the tuition and housing assistance helps students overcome some of the barriers that keep them from attending college.
While UPS previously has offered some incentives for employees in and around Louisville, the low unemployment rate has forced the company to try to attract employees from a greater radius. The program is unique to Louisville.
Armando Unzueta, a UPS human resources specialist, said that while Louisville area employers are struggling to find employees, many people in more rural areas of the state are looking for work — but sometimes do not know about available jobs or how to afford education or housing.
“All the companies are fighting as much as they can to bring in people,” he said. “We’re trying new things.”
The LOOP program requires candidates to work between 15 and 25 hours per week while they go to JCTC. Once they obtain a degree, they can get jobs much more easily, in areas including engineering, accounting, finance and aircraft maintenance, especially if they take the management route, Unzueta said.
UPS initiated the program about a year ago but began tours just this year — about 50 students take the tour every month — to give potential employees — and school counselors — a firsthand look at the great variety of available jobs and to reduce the intimidation factor when the job applicants arrive at the enormous facility.
By Boris Ladwig
Insider Louisville
