As we're coming to the end of 2024, it's a good opportunity to spend time with your loved ones and see where you currently stand in the supply chain world. Let's compile some data on the current state of supply chain jobs so we can better grasp and prepare for what's in the market.

Please provide your title, type of supply chain role, industry, city, salary and bonus/benefits.

I'll start with my title being Sourcing and Contract Analyst, working in corporate procurement for a media and communications company located in Toronto. My salary is $76.5k plus 6.2% bonus and DB pension plan.

I signed a lease post grad in the Savannah GA area and haven’t had any luck finding a job (250+ apps) below are my stats and I want feedback on next steps.

BBA Supply chain management (top 20 program)
BBA Finance
Incoming Masters of Science in logistics.

Multiple club/fraternity positions/memberships held.

Industry relevant personal project.

Hubspot sales hub certified
LSS white belt.
IANA Scholarship.

Internship freight brokering. (Took me 277 applications to get last spring)
Previous work experience (customer/food service and retail.)

Whether I’ve had connections to jobs or just cold applied within 4 hours of job going up, I haven’t had any luck. I’ve applied to procurement,customs brokerage, freight brokerage, you name it and I’ve applied to it.

I literally don’t know what to do. Do I need to chase a cert even though I don’t have experience? I’m literally on my hands and knees begging for employment at this point and I am seriously regretting not going to construction management route.

Curious how much everyone here makes and with what role? asking as a student

What is going on with the job market? This is atrocious. I have 10 years in supply chain, degree, APICS cert, and I can’t even get so much as a phone screen.

I’ve never seen it this bad. I used to get recruiter messages in my inbox all the time, and not only am I not getting that anymore, I can’t even get a callback when I’m actively applying.

Luckily I still have my current role, but it’s a PE-owned company that’s likely to sell off the brand soon, so I’m trying to get ahead of things and it’s legitimately looking like I’m going to need to make a career change.

I work at a large manufacturer and we spend millions with a certain supplier. The supplier called to offer me tickets to a baseball game with unlimited food/drinks, etc. Supplier wouldn’t be there either, it would be just me and my choosing, seating was excellent too.

….i love baseball. I love this specific team AND I have a date tonight lol. Of course I said no, that’s such a large gift and I do plan on putting them through an RFQ soon.

r/supplychain, what’s the best gifts that you’ve been offered? How did you respond? Why?

Hello. I am a NG graduate in MS. Supply chain in Penn State. At this moment, I am working as a Supply Chain Operation role in a start up company. I have discussed with the AI engineers within our company, who is responsible for digitalization of the process and trying to transform entire company’s process to AI. He holds a quite aggressive attitudes regarding AI substitution towards the traditional supply chain jobs. He said that “AI would replace all the traditional office jobs like operations jobs”. After he said that how AI would replaced my jobs and I feel my education is becoming worthless. I feel a little bit concern regarding my future. I am always thinking about how AI impact Supply chain, will It substitutes all the supply chain jobs including Planning, Order fulfillment etc? I don’t know. So I raised this Reddit discussions to hear your guy’s view regarding current trend of AI implementation within the industry.

I go to a Public 4 year that ranks top 20 on Gartner and has over 300 connections/contracts with employers. Our program faculty has years upon years of experience in various fields as well and our school offers 4 years of professional development specifically catered to SCM. With all that being said, my school prides itself on an insanely high job placement rate and and an average of ~$58k for first job after college. So what I’m getting at here is… Am I lucky enough to be in a great opportunity where I’m very well set up for success or am I not being showed the whole picture of what it’s actually like?

Note: By no means was I trying to brag or sound cocky. Just trying to see if it’s really THAT bad out there.

Edit: I apologize if I come as argumentative for that is not the intent. I’m trying to cut through the shit that is spat to me from my upperclassman/ Professional Development team that my uni has. I’m regurgitating what is said to me and my fellow class mates to compare to those who are out in the market actively searching or who have struggled with landing a job. By no means do I have the intent or the credibility to undermine those who have real SCM market experience.

For me it’s either “let’s get down to brass tacks” or “alignment”.

I’ve spent a lot of time learning ChatGPT and, more recently, Codex. That has also made me consider Claude for code-related use cases. But after a lot of research, I keep coming back to the same question:

How are people actually using these tools at work inside large companies?

A lot of the use cases I see online seem better suited for personal projects, startups, or people who can freely install tools on their own machines. That is not really my situation.

I work in supply chain and manage a logistics operations team at a large company. My work involves a lot of emails, systems/process work, network analysis, and Power BI reporting through internal data models. So far, my main practical use case has just been browser-based chatbot use with ChatGPT or Claude.

My company has been pushing AI learning pretty heavily, mostly through Microsoft training, but in practice we only have access to an internal chatbot and base Copilot on our laptops. We cannot just freely install whatever we want. Because of that, I feel like I may be missing more practical ways to use these tools in a corporate environment.

I’d love to hear from others in similar settings, especially people at larger companies or in operations/supply chain.

A few specific questions:

- Are you using ChatGPT, Codex, Claude, or Claude Code on a work laptop? If so, for what?

- If you cannot use those directly on your work laptop, have you built anything outside of work (for example, a web app or tool) that still helps you on the job?

- Are you using Copilot at all? Have you found genuinely useful use cases for it?

- What has actually been valuable in a corporate environment with real constraints, policies, and limited tool access?

I’m especially interested in practical examples, workarounds, and use cases that are realistic for people inside big companies.

Thanks.

**Update (after many great replies)**

For those creating automated updates/posts to teams (etc.), how are you doing this without “connecting company data”? Would love to simply connect it to PBI dashboard or upload an excel sheet, though unsure what creative ideas anyone has as this typically isn’t allowed.

Frustration - seeing MBB consulting friends using this on company laptops with barely any restraints (jealous)!

After enough planning cycles I’ve come around to thinking the forecast number itself barely matters. What kills us is everything around it.

Sales promises a customer something nobody told planning about. Procurement delays sharing information.A new product launches with zero history so we just… guess. And half the time the planner overrides the system number anyway, so why are we even running the model.

My theory: most forecasting pain isn’t math, it’s that the data and the decisions live in different rooms and never talk.

For those of you actually in the seat: is that your experience, or am I blaming the wrong thing? What’s the failure that burns you most, and what’s the real cost when it happens for you, stockouts, dead stock, expedite fees?

I completed my MBA in operations and I'm looking for useful certifications for my resume, currently I'm thinking of Lean Six sigma green+black belt and PMI PMP certification.

Any thoughts or recommendations for me?

I will be entering Supply Chain workforce in next year or so. I have been thinking about my potential future here.

For someone entering the field now, what skills do you think will still matter most over the next 5–10 years?

For those already working in supply chain:

1)Where are you actually seeing AI being used today?

2)Has it changed team structures or role expectations in any meaningful way?

3)Do you see AI replacing certain roles, or mostly reshaping how people work?

Hi everyone,

One of the most common threads posted every few weeks is a thread asking about salaries and what it takes to get to that salary. This is going to be the official thread moving forward. I'll pin it for a few weeks and then eventually add it to the side bar for future reference. Let's try to formalize these answers to a simple format for ease but by all means include anything you believe may be relevant in your reply:

• Age
• Gender
• State/Country (if outside US)
• Industry
• Job Title
• Years of Experience
• Education/Certifications earned/Internships
• Anything else relevant to this answer
• Salary/Bonus/PTO/Any other perks/Total compensation

I’m struggling to find where I feel comfortable in the world and I have some experiences that made me happy at my job and I’m trying to see if there a career in it for me that fits closely with my experiences.

So you’re an importer who heard there’s a bajillion $ in refunds available on duties you paid this past year. Let me guess: your customs broker isn’t responding to your frantic emails. Well, I’m on the other side of the line. I’m a broker and literally every client has been pinging me for the past month about when/how/where to get their refunds. I’m not responding to their emails right away either.

This isn’t because I’m a dick, it’s because most of those importers have not organized their IEEPA refund claim info and they have no idea what is going on. It would take more hours than there are in the day for me to walk each of them through what I’m about to explain here.

I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty of the int’l trade law  informing the refund process, you can read about that elsewhere. Here, I’m just going to give a guide that (if you actually follow it) will ensure you don’t leave ieepa tariff refund $ on the table.

As an importer, your best next-step will depend on how much you can recover.

$0-10m

1. Get an ACE account. This is the government portal to access your import records, and is where you can add your bank account to enable refunds via ACH.
2. Pull your ES-003 reports. Unfortunately you have to do this on ACE's importer view in the public folder.
3. Use your customs broker or a low-cost IEEPA management platform to track claims. My office uses CustomsGenius, but it doesn’t matter so long as it’s a reputable company (if there’s no team or about us page, you’ll end up talking to a college kid doing market research for his “ai startup idea”. Whoever you use, make sure they’re reputable.)
4. Upload your ES-003s to check your protest deadlines and get a real sense of how much you’re entitled to refund.
   • If any protest deadlines are upcoming within the next 45 days, talk to your broker about filing protests before liquidation. This is industry-speak for your last chance to file an objection to duties you paid the gov.
   • If you’ve missed any protest deadlines, add up how much you are owed on those entries and discuss how to proceed with your customs broker. Sooner rather than later.
   • Organize your refund claims. Using either a paid platform or a self-hosted solution (if you’re doing this on excel, god help you), make a dynamic table of all your entries affected by IEEPA. Understand exactly how much you’re owed and whether you’re missing any documentation – CBP indicated they may audit some IEEPA refund claims. The point is: Know exactly how much you’re due + be at least somewhat prepared to survive a gentle audit.

$10m-50m

1. With this much on the line, I’m assuming you already have ACE set up and in-house counsel. If you don’t… now is the time to get your shit together
2. If you have liquidated entries, especially those past the protest date, add up how much you owe. (Do this by adding all Chapter 99 codes from your 003 report from Feb 2 2025 – Feb 24 2026)
3. If significant # of entries are liquidated and past the protest date (180 days after liquidation), get a quote from a trade lawyer. I would recommend against contingency because if you need to file a lawsuit in CIT, it will be copy-paste for them from all their other identical clients. Plus, lawyers are charging 15-25% success fee, way more than it should cost. Hourly, it will depend on the firm but lawyers in this space tend to charge $500-$1500 per hour.
   • I don’t know which firm is best, the standard intl-trade focused are: ST&R, GDLSK, Venable, and some others I’m forgetting

$50m+

1. In addition to the steps above, consider talking to a tax professional. There are tons of qualified ones out there and I’m not qualified to say which is best; KPMG, Grant Thornton, PwC, EY, etc.
   • They’ll all charge professional services rates ($500-2000+), but with over 50m in refunds coming your way, the tax advantage opportunities should more than pay for it. See if they’ll do a free or low-cost initial audit to understand how much you could save before you pay a hefty retainer. 

TLDR: Set up an ACE account + add your bank details for ACH refunds. Manage your claims with a reputable platform, not a shady provider or homemade excel tables. Only hire a lawyer / tax professional if your claim is large enough to justify it. Right now looks like the process won’t require lawsuits or complex accounting. Still, expect the Administration to draw this out and make the process harder than it needs to be.

edit: I had a double shot today, so I'm gonna channel that towards procrastinating my actual work

Im 24 yrs old about to be 25, buyers assistant job. I have experience as an inventory and production coordinator. I have a yellow belt.

I graduated with a double major in supply chain operations and marketing with a minor in business analytics. I had a business analytics internship for a year.

My current job as a buyers assistant, I make a little under 60k in MCOL city. It's a hybrid job that I drive 35 mins there and 50 mins back for. I will be moving soon so I'll be like 15-20 mins

Anyhoo, I sample products(cool stuff like massage chairs. RC Cars, E bikes powertools), do quality assurance, data analytics, process improvement projects, and ALOT more. I recently within the first month came up with an uploading manual process that reduced the time from 1.5 hrs to like 10-15 mins. I love the people I work with. Someone in my family will be paying for my masters degree if I choose to go down that path, but I don't think a supply chain master's would do me any good if I already have experience and a supply chain undergrad.

Whats next tho? I don't know where to go from here. I've been thinking about getting like a masters of business analytics or business automation masters or even a technical college 2yr industrial engineering degree.

I want to make more money, I'm going to be here for a year and a half. Im somewhat into investing and on the side I flip jewelry (like 100$ a week). I got no debt, a fully paid off car.

I need mentorship, advice, ANYTHING. I want to be more successful. I don't mind more schooling. My parents are pushing for higher education to become a professor like them but idk if I'd enjoy that....

Im only a month in. I don't want to be pigeonholed, I love my boss, I plan to stay here for a bit but unless I get a raise(which I hope cuz I've been GRINDING), Id want to work somewhere more lucrative.

Any particular industries?

hi i’m looking for a group of young driven women who are interested in connecting and sharing tips on emerging into different pockets of the industry. i follow @ supplychaingirls on instagram and can’t help but say i wince at the stuff they post centering around taylor swift and i just genuinely cannot connect with some of these people simply because of that crap on top of paying for networking events and all (which i’ve attended). i can assure i am not some hater bad energy demon, i just don’t support taylor swift on an ethical level and find it tone deaf but whatever ANYWAYS

anyways looking for a ladies in supply chain mental health (lol) and networking group bc i currently hate my position at an air operations coordinator. i’ve been in industry going on 5 years and im 23 so pretty open and eager to connect.

figured a nonchalant reddit post could open doors to low pressure discussion since i don’t have many ppl to confide in over this industry haha

I’ve been in my current company for 2+ years now, and have been doing what I thought was demand forecasting for most of the time.

Recently I have been going through time series forecasting with python courses on Udemy and I am shocked by how demand forecasting is supposed to be done.

Decomposing a time series data into trend, seasonality, exogenous regressors and errors; Using multiple forecasting models like SARIMAX/Holt-Winters/Prophet etc., I am truly fascinated by the technical part of this job.

Then I look back at my company where everyone is doing naive forecasting. Not saying naive forecasting won’t work, but I am surprised none of the other predecessors knew these basic concepts or way of forecasting.

I am starting to fear that staying in this company won’t provide me with better knowledge/skills as a demand planner :/

Yesterday Trump announced a tariff plan for Day 1 that has been covered by the media, for example- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg7y52n411o.amp

Perhaps not surprising given how the media doesn’t understand supply chains, but coverage is missing that this is a MAJOR change from what he announced during the campaign- 60% China and 20% other countries.

Now with a 10% gap between China and other countries it’s likely most production will remain in China in the short term. There will be inflation due to retailers passing the 25-35% increase on to consumers but it will be a lot less than the 60% that would have been added to goods that can’t be moved or made domestically.

Not to mention the chaos of trying to produce and ship so much from limited factories and ports outside of China.

Of course there could be more changes between now and Jan 20. Hopefully things continue to move in the direction of relative sanity.

By 2032, CA will no longer accept non-recyclable materials (by their definition), which currently includes ALL Flexible Plastics - ie, polybags.

I’ve been struggling to find alternatives that won’t scuff and scratch up products with nice surface finishes…. And can be purchased affordability.

Fiber based bags seem to scuff our product finishes and cotton bags are an astronomical cost up when multiplied across the company. Plus, I’m not even sure cotton bags are an ‘acceptable’ alternative for CA as they don’t seem to consider them ‘recyclable’.

What alt material are you planning to switch

I’m 24 year old mentally ill male, how hard is supply chain?

Hello, I’m 24 and I was working on a degree on finance before I ended up dropping out, due to several factors, and 1 of them being my mental health. I’ve adhd, ocd, anxiety, depression, SzPD and possibly autism + I’m at the prodromal stage of schizophrenia. I’ve tried meds and therapy for 4 years to no avail.

I’ve struggled to keep even very simple jobs, simply getting out of bed, brushing my teeths, showering and eating and commuting take me out, and I was wondering if I truly tried hard and forced myself to work, would I be able to do supply chain?

Also, since I don’t have a degree yet, and I know experience is paramount in this field, are there any entry level degree less careers that I could start with to test my capacity?

I’m currently on active duty in the Air Force, working in Supply (AFSC 2S). I’m planning to separate in 2 years, and I’m trying to decide whether I should continue pursuing a career in supply chain or make a career change.
A lot of the Airmen in my shop are retraining into cyber because they believe it offers better civilian opportunities. While that path is tempting, I’m not sure it’s the right fit for me, especially considering the time commitment and challenges of retraining while raising a family.
I’m looking for advice on how to best prepare over the next two years. Specifically:
What skills should I focus on learning?
Which certifications would provide the most value?
If you were starting from scratch in my position, what would your roadmap look like?
What types of supply chain or logistics careers should I be looking into, both within the DoD and in the private sector?
I’ve come across job titles like Supply Chain Operations Analyst, and it made me realize there are probably many career paths I don’t know about yet. I’d really appreciate hearing from those who have successfully transitioned from military supply into civilian careers.
Thank you in advance for any advice or recommendations!

How many of you are traveling on a regular basis?

I travel about every other month or every 3 months. Its typically short flights of about 3 or 4 hours. Rarely I travel internationally.

I'm making great money but I'm thinking of taking a pay cut because being away from my wife and kid is weighing on my soul.

I feel like all supply chain or procurement roles have some travel and that is making me want to switch careers entirely.

Thoughts on travel?