Supply Chain Management Talent Development

Supply chain management (SCM) is a talent-based discipline. While automation, equipment, and technology play key roles, supply chain success is driven by the talents of managers, planners, analysts, and related personnel.

Hence, company leaders must treat SCM professionals as strategic resources that warrant significant investment. Unfortunately, developing and keeping high-caliber SCM talent is a growing challenge. Problems include:

Availability – the combination of an aging workforce with a younger generation that values flexibility and advancement over career stability makes it very difficult to find, train, and retain stable SCM teams.1
Interest – SCM is a demanding field with recurring deadlines, non-stop action, demanding customers, and labor challenges. Otherwise talented individuals may not be interested in this fast-paced, stressful field.
Experience – Compared to other professions, SCM is a young field with relatively few universities providing supply chain education. This limits the pool of seasoned SCM professionals, encourages talent poaching, and intensifies the impact of turnover.2 These issues also impede the development of a defined career path in the SCM profession.
Expense – the cost of recruiting, hiring, and training a replacement employee to be as much as 1.5 times the departing employee’s salary. And that does not include the institutional knowledge and experience that is lost when unanticipated turnover occurs.3

To overcome these problems and foster supply chain success, organizations need to establish strategic talent development and retention (TDR) programs. Pragmatic programs for talent acquisition, development, and retention are vital to keeping high-performance SCM teams intact and contributing to company success.

Research Objectives

We will create a more holistic understanding of the SCM talent domain through the following research objectives:

1. Determine and categorize, by size and type of organization, the specific SCM skills being pursued via hiring, training and development efforts.
2. Identify the primary approaches by which organizations recruit, hire, and onboard SCM professionals.
3. Determine and categorize, by size and type of organization, the training and development methods organizations are pursuing to develop SCM competencies/skills in their workforce.
4. Analyze the structure and formality of SCM career paths and their roles in talent development.
5. Identify best-in-class SCM talent development programs and investigate their processes for program establishment, management, and impact measurement. Also, ascertain their influence on talent retention and contribution to organizational performance.

Research Approach

The research team will adopt a two-stage research plan that leverages multiple methodologies to explore, analyze, and synthesize best practices in supply chain TDR.

Stage 1 of the research focuses on Research Objectives 1-4. We will begin the study of each research priority with expert interviews and literature reviews of past research and company documents. Then, we will use surveys, focus groups, and/or case studies to close those significant knowledge gaps revealed by our interviews and literature reviews.

Stage 2 of the research will target organizations identified during Stage 1 as having unique and industry-leading supply chain TDR capabilities. These best-in-class practices will be the basis of the Research Objective 5 investigation and deliverables.

If you would like to participate please email cscmpresearch@cscmp.org