STANDARDS: Back to School with Roadmap 2.0

Roadmap 2.0 is intended to serve as a crib sheet to help business leaders plan for an increasingly uncertain future as it pertains to material handling and logistics.

By Patrick Davison, MHI Director of Education and Standards

This fall, the Class of 2030 started kindergarten, and this past June, the Class of 2017, who started kindergarten in 2004, graduated from high school.

While the Class of 2017 mastered reading, writing and arithmetic, we endured the Great Recession, elected the first African-American President, saw social media rise in prominence, and witnessed the proliferation of smartphones. In 2005, Amazon stock traded at $45 per share, Facebook had 1 million users, primarily on college campuses, and Google reveled in its first year as a publicly traded company. Today, Amazon’s stock price hovers around $1,000 per share, Facebook has nearly 2 billion users, and Google is the world’s second largest company, behind Apple.

The business world can change quickly in a short period of time, and by all accounts, the pace of change will continue to increase. While we can never be sure what will be in store for the Class of 2030, we can hypothesize what the future holds by evaluating today’s megatrends in Technology, Consumers, Infrastructure, and Employment, and how these trends could impact the future.

This is the reason for the U.S. Roadmap for Material Handling & Logistics 2.0 (Roadmap 2.0).

Roadmap 2.0 is intended to serve as a crib sheet to help business leaders plan for an increasingly uncertain future as it pertains to material handling and logistics. And while the Roadmap 2.0 will not help you find the next Amazon or Google stock to help today’s kindergarteners to pay for college, it will help to provide a framework on what the future could hold.