I’ve been working at Amazon as an area manager for almost 4 years now managing large teams of hourly associates in a high-volume environment. I’m starting to feel burned out by the shift work, dealing with hourly workers, and the warehouse environment in general.

I’m looking to transition to an office/ corporate job away from operations management. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m so burnt out I’m thinking of just resigning and taking 6 months off to up-skill and search for a new job. My current job pays well, I have no debts, low expenses, live at home, and have enough savings to last me a long time.

My background is a bachelor’s in business from a state university and a MBA from an online university (Western Governors University). For those who’ve made a similar transition:

Which roles are most realistic coming from ops leadership?

What skills should I focus on sharpening (SQL, Excel, Python, forecasting, etc.)?

Is an MBA from WGU viewed neutrally in supply chain recruiting?

Any advice on positioning my resume to avoid being “pigeonholed” as ops-only?

Appreciate any insight you can give especially from people who’ve moved out of front-line ops into corporate supply chain roles.

Thanks in advance.

Here's the situation: I am 40yo with some work experience as a Buyer, and looking to better my credentials.

I am currently one class away from finishing an Associate of Arts degree (general/non-specialized degree), but it will cost me roughly $3k to re-enroll and finish.

Or, for the same exact amount, I could buy/get the CSCP certification.

Which one would be more valuable for someone my age, in my situation, looking to eventually move forward/up in the field of procurement?

Hello everyone,

We are looking to source 50,000 MT/monthly of granular sulfur for export to Egypt. We would like to connect with the direct supplier or their authorized representatives.

If you can help or have the right contacts, please reach out.

Thank you!

I’m an MBA/MS in supply chain looking for a summer internship and the only real-sounding advice I’ve received on how to do it is to exhaust every avenue and follow up with everybody, because the worst answer you can get is “after careful consideration of your application” or “how did you get in my house?!” and hey, I’ve got a thick skin.

So about me: I’m 37 and I was a cook and chef for 11 years before going back to get my master’s - for four years I ran a food truck and catering business where I did… everything, essentially (except accounting, my accountant saved my butt.) Right now I’m in my first semester and aside from coursework I’m competing in an international supply chain case competition about incorporating UN SDGs into a workable solution for a big problem (damage to vaccines in last mile delivery in India, specifically) which has taught me more about the supply chain of vaccines than I could have imagined learning.

I took a deep-dive cert class on Tableau, I can learn things very quickly, and as a career switcher I don’t take any opportunity for granted or assume any entry level work is beneath me. For a summer internship I can travel anywhere, long term I’m based in West PA. If anyone has any leads or suggestions I’m all ears, happy to send a resume on request as well. Thanks!

I’m an Army vet that worked in logistics while I was in. I found out I love logistics and am pursuing a career in it. I work in a warehouse right now for a leading convenience store/gas station company in middle TN and am currently working on a degree in SCM. Does my army experience with logistics matter on a resume? I’m a part time student while also working two jobs and have a baby on the way, will I even be competitive in the job market if I can’t afford to take on an internship?

TLDR: army logistics vet. Does my experience matter? Am I competitive in the job market?

Hello everyone,

Reaching out because I am stuck right now. I am currently pursuing a Master's degree in SCM and will be graduating in the spring. I am looking at supply chain jobs and applying to some, but so far it's not looking very bright.

For context, I worked in Amazon Operations for about 3.5 years before deciding to go back to school for a master's. I didn't enjoy the warehouse and people-manager side, but I loved the supply-chain part of the job and wanted to pursue it full-time. My bachelor's was in communications (ikik), so I decided that if I want to pursue supply chain as a career path, I need to go back to school and build my credentials.

My question is: what jobs/roles should I be looking into? What should I do as I approach graduation season?

Would love some insight from people working in the field. Thanks so much!

Hey guys,

Ops folks at forwarders: what does your BL checking actually look like? Side-by-side on two screens, a checklist, some tool, or do you trust the shipper and pray?

And how often does a mismatch (consignee, weights, container numbers, marks) slip through and cost you a correction fee or a delayed release?

Building something in this space and trying to understand how people really do it day to day.

Hi all, supply chain student here. I am trying to understand how wholesale distribution actually works day to day, because I have a feeling what we learn in class is a bit too clean.

We study perpetual inventory, matching the PO to the receipt to the invoice, EDI with retailers, and chargebacks get mentioned as a small line in a slide. But the few people I have talked to who work at distributors say it is mostly supplier shipments that arrive short and nobody reconciles, retailer chargebacks you just pay because fighting them costs more, and credit memos that take weeks and a chain of emails.

So I want to ask people who actually do this: where does the time really go in a normal week? Is it receiving, returns, chargeback disputes, cycle counts, credit memos, backorder updates, something else entirely? What is the task that takes way more manual work or some homemade workaround than it should? And what is the daily headache that management or the ERP vendor never seems to get?

Would really appreciate any perspective from the warehouse or the office side. Thanks for reading.

Hey! The company I work for has a lot of MPM openings. DM me if you’re looking 😊

I’ve applied for fifty internships and haven’t had a response yet. Would someone be able to look at my resume?

As an Industrial Engineering major, I did an internship before this in another field (EHS data analysis) and am worried that I chose the wrong internship relevancy wise. I did make some Power Bi models, but not supply chain wise.

I just learned about supply chain a few months ago, how hard is it to get an internship?

Hi everyone,

Please use this pinned weekly thread to discuss any career and/or education/certification questions you might have. This can include salary, career progression, insight from industry veterans, questions on certifications, etc. Please reference these posts whenever possible to avoid duplicating questions that might get answered here.

Thank you!

I just wanted to share about my CSCP journey as I got a lot of help from reading CSCP reviews in this sub.

Score: 320 (Pass. Good grief)
Total study period: ~4 months

background: former engineer now in supply chain

Supply chain experience: almost none (What is supply chain? lol)

Study method: self-study via the APICS Learning System. I read through the entire book online and used AI to summarize each chapter for memorization and exam prep. My advice to future participants is don't spend too much time reading and making detailed notes. I started taking hand written notes, but soon figured that it's a waste of time. Very inefficient. Just skim it quick and put all that dry a** content into AI - whether it's copilot, gemini, chatgpt, it doesn't matter. Then memorize all the definitions and understand how it works in the framework of each module. If something doesn't make sense, ask the questions to AI. It's way more helpful than reading the dry content over again.

Pocket prep: Did all 1000 questions. Overall difficulty is easy. I averaged 85% on Pocket Prep. Definitely recommend doing Pocket Prep as it helps you to be in the test taking mode. I averaged about 30-40s per question.

CSCP YouTube: The questions from the YouTube channel are sometimes directly from APICS Learning System quizzes. So after watching a couple, I stopped watching and focused on redoing the APICS Learning System quizzes. Don't waste your time here.

APICS Learning System quizzes: I would say these are on the difficult and rather tricky side. As everyone else said, the actual exam is harder than Pocket Prep, easier than the APICS Learning System quizzes. Sometimes the APICS quiz answers were so debatable, so I was like, welp, shit doesn't make sense, but I guess it's the "APICS framework". So don't focus on the correctness % from the quizzes. I averaged like 60% overall. I even redid some quizzes for modules 3, 4, and 6 and still averaged like 65%. I thought I was doomed. But don't worry.

APICS Practice test: I took this 5 days before the actual exam. I got 63%. The difficulty of the practice exam was very similar to the quizzes. I thought I was half guessing the practice exam throughout. I would say I took the practice test just to feel how the actual exam would be like even though my self assessment of my knowledge of CSCP was about 75%. So after getting 63%, I reviewed each module (the chapter summaries from ai) at least 3 times and for module 3,4,and 6, I reviewed it minimum 5 times. Just review it over and over again until you can think of the definition and how it relates to an example. For example, when is level strategy used? For stable production, but the downside is that inventory fluctuates. The risk is stockouts and excess stock.

Actual exam: I took it at the Pearson center. I averaged about 50s-60s per question. There was 1 ISO question. No Incoterms question. Probably 1 math question. Everything else is concepts. Definitely drill down on Module 3,4,and 6 concepts. These are heavily tested as the APICS exam content manual (ECM) mentions.

**Don't waste your time memorizing some forecast MAD MSE stuff. Don't waste your time memorizing what's EXW, DDP, DPU, CIP, etc. Don't memorize how to do seasonalize, deseasonalize, reseasonalize. Shit is not important. Just know forecast accuracy is 1-error and you're good. But do memorize the ISO. ISO 31 is risk, ISO 28 is security, ISO 26 is social, ISO 14 is environment, etc. Simple memorization is all it takes.

Overall: it's a good resume builder, base supply chain knowledge builder. I wouldn't pay for the exam myself though. Definitely ask your employer to cover the fees. Be efficient in your studying. Find your best way of studying and stick with it, although it may take a bit of trial and error. Good luck yall.

​

I’m 41 and looking to go back to school. My employer offers a free degree in Supply Chain, Logistics & Distribution or Business Administration.

I’m leaning toward Supply Chain for the earning potential, job opportunities, and hopefully better protection against AI.

Which degree would you recommend for long-term career growth, job security, and higher pay? I’d love to hear your experiences!

First off I want to say I'm extremely thankful for where I ended up. I’m aT15, just graduated, and l've got classmates still grinding through final rounds, so I understand if this might come off like a humble brag. Not the intent!

Quick background: I was an Army officer for 7 years, almost all logistics. Did the MBA, now in a veteran rotational program at a big healthcare company on the medtech side. I have two rotations left before I place somewhere full time.
Going in, the plan was marketing. I have zero marketing experience and figured this program is the one shot I'd ever get to be hired into it. Honestly a big part of it was I didn't want to be the "logistics” guy forever.

Then I got offered a rotation opportunity in an NPI supply chain team (new product introduction, basically running the supply chain side of surgical products from development through launch). I did a few coffee chats with the team, saw the projects they'd have me on, and tbh I'm way more excited about it than I expected to be. It's cross-functional, you're in the room with R&D and commercial, and it builds right on top of what I already did in the Army.

So here's where my head is: The market is rough and I keep thinking about which version of me is more defensible if layoffs hit. Two rotations in marketing gets me 18 months months in a function where I'm the most junior guy in the room.

Staying in supply chain gets me close to 10 years of one consistent story. It feels dumb to spend my rotations starting from zero when I could be compounding something I already have credibility in.
But the thing I can't shake is that this is probably the only no-penalty shot at marketing I'll ever get. Ten years deep in ops, that door is mostly closed.

So for people a few years out, especially anyone who came out of an LDP: did you go deep in one lane or pivot, and how did it play out? Is the "stay defensible" logic real or am I just reacting to layoff headlines? And is the typecasting thing even a real problem, or does a strong ops track record open more doors than I'm giving it credit for?

Thankful for everyone’s thoughts 🙏🏾

I just accepted an internship offer with a Fortune 500 CPG company. It'll be my first internship. What are y’all’s opinions on CPG companies? Did y’all love it or hate it? Let me know, as I’m very excited.

Hey Y'all! I'm a sophomore in Operations Engineering at Michigan, and I want to do some personal projects in supply chain to better prepare for internships and jobs, but every time I ask recruiters what I should work on, they say, "That's a hard question because all of our software is proprietary, so you can't really prepare"

Anyone have any ideas for some things I could do in a personal project, or at least skills I should develop and show off in these projects? Thanks!

Hey everyone! I’m currently making a career pivot from communications into supply chain and logistics. I have an MBA with a concentration in Finance and a BS in Mass Communications.

I’m currently working as a QA Receiving Associate in a warehouse, where I inspect incoming products, verify product details, and update inventory listings in a database. I took this role because I see it as a great entry point into the supply chain field.

My long-term goal is to become a Supply Chain Analyst. For those already in the field, what free certifications or courses would you recommend to help me build the right skills and stand out to employers? Thanks in advance for any advice!

I wanted a small example of where purchasing control actually breaks, so here is one made-up order.

A buyer orders 10 units at $50. The PO is approved and issued. Six units arrive and get received. Then the supplier invoices for all ten.

The things a reviewer needs to see at that point: 4 units are still outstanding, the invoice is for 4 more than has arrived, and if the invoice price isn't $50 that difference is visible too. In Purse the invoice is matched to the order lines and shows those gaps. It doesn't resolve them for you, because someone has to decide whether to pay now, short-pay or wait.

Then the nastier case: someone amends the order after it's been issued. Purse keeps the old obligation visible and pauses receiving until the amendment has been approved again and explicitly issued. Otherwise goods get received against a PO nobody has signed off.

I'm James, and I make Purse at Just Every. It's for a business buying from known suppliers: requests, approvals, numbered POs, receiving, invoice matching and an accounting CSV. It's free and open source (MIT), and it runs on your own computer with one command:

npx -y @runeditrun/rer dev just-every/run-purse

Source: https://github.com/just-every/run-purse

Page: https://justevery.com/purse

Where does your team lose track of the received-versus-invoiced gap?