So here it is already February of this brave new year of 2022. The pandemic grinds on, continuing to disrupt supply chains and most every other aspect of our economies. Just about every bit of our personal lives and communities have been turned topsy, resulting in good and bad changes.

Two Years of Positive Growth

These past two years have been mostly good years for CLEP. Our organization has been steadily growing with new services and offerings for both our members and defense industry logisticians in general. Last year we rebuilt our website and launched our CLEP certification program. We finished off the year with our first-ever virtual workshop, a two-day event of ten solid presentations by leading logisticians within our community.

This year we’ve already taken initiatives that continue to grow our organization. First; if you visited our website over the past few weeks you might have noticed how much faster it loads. This is a result of moving from a basic shared-hosting to a cloud-hosting service. Cloud-hosting offers faster website loading speeds, increased security from hackers, and expanded file storage for growing our website.

This move allows us to continue expanding our services, and is a reflection of the success we’ve had in the past year. So please excuse us for giving ourselves a pat on the back.

Volunteers Wanted

With growth comes a need for resources beyond digital. We are beginning to look for volunteers to help our leadership team. CLEP is a chartered 501C non-profit organization focused on education to the defense logistics community. All of our leadership team and board of advisors are volunteers. For the most part, we’re also grey-beards wanting to pass-on our somewhat painfully-acquired knowledge to the next generation of logisticians.

We’re presently developing an organizational structure for volunteer support. We already know we need volunteers to help on the following committees:

Education Committee

We presently offer a certification program that has mirrored the Defense Acquisition University (DAU). However, the DAU has moved to a two-level certification program starting this month. Our three-level certification program may begin to diverge from DAU.

We have also been looking at expanding our certification program with meaningful micro-badging in specific areas of logistics. This will involve first identifying the necessary skill-sets that align with micro-badges.

In order to expand our certification programs we need people willing to offer their insight into defining skill-sets for logistics micro-badging. We also need people with backgrounds in training that can help put our programs on a solid educational foundation.

Communications Committee

Communications is all about letting people know what we’re doing and what we offer. Our communications focus is the CLEP website. But we also recognize there are other means of communications using various media to support our communications efforts.

We started a more-or-less monthly opt-in newsletter last year, and want to expand our emailing communications. Part of this challenge is to strike a balance between sending emails that offer value to the recipients without creating the appearance of spam. We would also like to expand our presence on social media, particularly our LinkedIn page, but also in other appropriate media.

In order to improve our communications outreach, we need people able to work with social media. We also need people who enjoy writing and are interested in sharing their logistics knowledge through blog posts on this website.

Workshop organizers

Our November virtual workshop was well-received, and we are presently organizing two future virtual workshops, one for this spring and another in the fall (watch these pages for more information). Organizing workshops is a labor intensive effort beyond lining up presenters.

We need presenters for our planned workshops, as well as people to help with the general behind-the-scenes work involved in organizing and promoting them.

Contacts

If interested in volunteering to work with the CLEP leadership team, please contact one of the following:

Jon Hatch – president@logisticsengineers.org

Vijay Chachra – education@logisticsengineers.org

Ron Charest – communications@logisticsengineers.org