Centennial Professor for Innovative Technology Management at the University of Texas, Austin. In addition to flexibility, there are many more project management skills that you need as a supply chain leader. Of course, a lot depends on the leadership role you are in, but if you go to the top you will likely have multiple management positions along the way, most of which will lead you projects from time to time.

The main research results show that SC professionals use a wide range of learning mechanisms throughout their careers and that the contribution and complexity of these mechanisms differ with antiquity and change dynamically. In general, five mechanisms seem to be more essential for learning SC professionals, namely collaboration, stretching activities, change of perspective, feedback and reflection. An interesting finding was that it is considered difficult to find space for reflection and feedback in daily work practice, despite the perceived impact on learning. Another important finding is the idea that learning mechanisms should not be seen as isolated phenomena, but as deeply integrated into the social system, in particular with SCM’s main activities and learning attitudes. SCM’s main activities appear to be, such as collaboration, key process integration and shared risk, coincide with learning the essential learning mechanisms, and unlike feedback and reflection, such learning mechanisms appear to be common and easy to find.

“Christian was able to outline the impact of transportation decisions and recommend viable opportunities to reduce overall transportation costs and improve supply chain efficiency,” explains Marianne McDonald. Goehring says that his strong analytical skills have not only helped him find the best solutions for customers, but also seek cost savings for the company. ‘The most rewarding part of my work is the depth and breadth of the people I interact with on a daily basis.

Learning from experts can help the student shorten his competition time, especially if the student has just graduated or a new employee. This form of mentoring can also help fill specific gaps in knowledge or skills related to the current role of an employee and prepare the employee to promote future roles and responsibilities. In the meantime, the mentor plays the role of a material expert and gives his wisdom to a new generation of employees. Taylor firmly believes in helping others succeed both personally and professionally. Although relatively young, he feels responsible for the development of the next generation of leaders.

Penny described how her organization did not have a common process on how to handle product stocks and how the stakeholders involved had their own, sometimes counterproductive, procedures to address the problem. After a multifunctional collaboration meeting, they learned about the demands of others and developed a new way of working based on this. By creating a wide network of people with different experiences and backgrounds, successful SC professionals therefore gain access to a wide range of functions and organizations and their experience.

First, you can explore the cultural dimensions of workplace learning for SC professionals that go beyond the cultural context of this study. Secondly, the extraordinary importance of the learning attitude raises questions about how such an attitude can be promoted in practice, leaving room for further research. Third, since we do not explicitly look at the range of learning outcomes, but rather focus on the mechanisms that enable learning, future research could explore possible links between specific learning mechanisms and results. Future research may also delve into cognitive mechanisms and their partially ambiguous use, better understanding the unconscious aspects of such mechanisms.

At the age of 29, Lobo is one of the youngest directors of his company and leads combined international logistics, distribution and customer service within the global supply chain. He manages hundreds of organizations in the global locations of the Fortune Supply Chain Headhunters 120 company and is responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in expenses. Lobo led the development and implementation of the company’s global distribution model, leading to new efficiency and millions of savings while managing its Dubai center.

As supply chains worldwide grow in size and scale, academic literature underlined the increasing role and importance of soft skills. Traditionally, supply chain literature has focused on hard skills, including functional and technical skills with limited discussion of soft skills. Therefore, the purpose of this document is to assess and explore the demand for soft skills in supply chain management.

Second, all respondents worked for large global companies and their indigenous cultural base was rooted in Northern Europe. Therefore, our results could have limited application for SC professionals in small and medium businesses and in other cultures, although some respondents had such experiences. Third, the study is based on respondents’ learning perceptions, which may be wrong in some cases, combined with an interpretative form of data analysis.

More generally, respondents agreed that their supply chain leadership and staff had the skills to manage an end-to-end supply chain today, but 80% said their staff needed new digital skills to maintain their competitiveness . Even today, with more disruptive technologies on the horizon, supply chains are mainly managed through systems with dashboards and information provided to external tablets. What used to be a paper-based process has become a more dynamic digital environment, with software specially designed for supply chains. Storage and assembly line workers have now been asked to adopt a technological talent: reading panels, using predictive analyzes or RPA tools and looking at data instead of relying on their years of intensive experience and knowledge at work.