Shauntil Johnson asked if she could deliver a few brief remarks before the end of her graduation ceremony recently. Stylishly dressed in skinny black pants, purple knee-high boots and a sleeveless top—a departure from her attire as a student forklift driver—she leaned into the microphone and spoke confidently to the 50 or so people gathered in the small auditorium.
“I just wanted to say that the people in this program have become very special to me, and I appreciate every one of them.”
Johnson, 23, and eight of her classmates from the Supply Chain Institute’s eight-week training course stood on The Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Chevy Chase Bank Auditorium stage, posing for photos and clutching their completion certificates. The group had successfully completed the course dedicated to the ins and outs of warehouse supply chain. They were now certified in occupational health and safety, forklift driving, and warehouse logistics.
The course is a job training partnership between Baltimore City Community College and The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Students 18 to 25 spend two months learning the complexities of the different disciplines of the hospital supply chain. The program was established for Baltimore high school graduates interested in the field of large-scale shipping, receiving and distribution operations. Graduation from the institute is intended to serve as the first step on a career path, rather than mere training for an entry-level job.
Everything The Johns Hopkins Hospital uses—supplies, equipment, food—comes to a 22-bay loading dock on trucks from vendors and distributors around the country. Each step of the complicated process, from warehouse inventory management to ordering the supplies to quality assurance to distribution, falls to the supply chain team.
The ceremony included graduates from the two previous classes as well as students in the current Supply Chain Institute class.
Desmond Jackson, director of patient accounts for the Johns Hopkins Health System, one of the architects of the course, says that the classes continue to draw students and, with each cohort, the course runs smoother. “It’s great that we’ve been able to get behind this project and that it’s up and running,” he says. Thus far, Johns Hopkins has hired two of the graduates but is interviewing more in the coming weeks.
Johnson, who lives in the Curtis Bay section of Baltimore, expressed gratitude to the Supply Chain Institute’s instructors and administrators. “Thank you for seeing something in our city’s young people,” she said. “We’re not bad. So many of us are just looking for a chance, something to grab onto. This class has been that for me.”
She said she’s putting her supply chain experience to work right away as a temporary employee in Sephora’s cosmetic warehouse. Five days a week, she rides a company shuttle from Curtis Bay to Aberdeen, Maryland. But she has her sights set firmly on Johns Hopkins for full-time employment.
“That’s what I really want,” she says.
