Job Families / Roles
LOGISTICS IS A REALLY DIVERSE INDUSTRY.
In this section we’ve broken the sector down into 14 key areas. Each contains a number of different specific roles within it, but each also represents a particular part of the logistics supply chain.
By scrolling through, you’ll get an idea of the job families that best suit your interest, ambitions and skills.
Customs and International Trade
Customs and International Trade roles are vital to every movement of goods between countries. Without them, goods simply aren’t able to cross borders and complete their journeys.
Getting it right means being able to solve problems, keep a cool head and fully understand all relevant compliance standards.
Environment and Sustainability
This is a particularly future-orientated area, in the sense that it’s responsible for ensuring that the sector is able to innovate and evolve in line with a more environmentally aware global economy.
Whether it’s looking at the decarbonisation of the supply chain, or low natural resource usage in warehousing, it’s an ever growing and ever more important part of modern logistics.
Getting it right means being able to solve problems, keep a cool head and fully understand all relevant compliance standards.
Transportation
Transportation is the part of logistics that you might be most familiar with. But even though getting something from A to B may sound simple enough, doing it on the scale our industry operates at takes a whole range of skill, talent and well, people!
Getting it right means being able to solve problems, keep a cool head and fully understand all relevant compliance standards.
Warehousing
Sometimes overlooked but absolutely essential, the warehouse is the engine room of logistics. In the most basic terms, warehousing is the storage and inventory of goods before they are shipped – but that doesn’t really do justice to the diversity of vital roles required to deliver the organisation, accuracy, scale or technology of the operation.
Customer Care
Customer care sounds simple – it’s just answering enquiries, right? – but it’s actually the glue that holds the link between logistics and customers together. Communication is the name of the game here, whether that’s speedily solving problems with the potential to disrupt global supply chains, or scoping out logistics possibilities before customers have even imagined them.
Infrastructure
Whether goods arrive by plane, train, lorry or ship, they can’t move without the infrastructure they depend on – airports, railways, roads and ports. From the largest international projects connecting continents, to local developments to make final mile transport easier and more sustainable, infrastructure is vital at any scale and scope.
Digital Tech
Logistics might be about moving things around in the real world, but all that physical activity – the lorries, planes, ships and boats – is underpinned by a digital world of tech and services, from the apps that customers use to track their delivery through to the automated robotics in the warehouse. Though Digital Tech might feel like a supporting role, the skills and innovations the discipline drives are vital in moving logistics forward. And the skills required to do so are some of the most valuable on the job market.
Engineering
This contains a wide array of skills and specialisms, but essentially it’s the bit that ensures the infrastructure and equipment needed in the supply chain is fully operational, and working as well as it can. As such it’s both repair and maintenance, as well as innovation and creativity (to make sure everything is fit for purpose in the modern world). Read on to check out the prospects, the pay and the requirements – and see if it sounds like you!
Human Resources
Perhaps the job family that connects most specifically with the purpose of the Generation Logistics initiative, human resources is all about finding the people and skills the industry needs. It’s not just recruitment but retention too, focusing on the wellbeing of the staff working in logistics organisations, identifying their needs, and ensuring the workplace is a positive and engaging place to be!
Solutions Design
Solutions design pretty much does what it says on the tin. Designing solutions to logistics problems or challenges is, quite literally, the name of the game. Solutions designers are experts at understanding what customers need, and working out ways to provide it through design methodology. It’s not just flashes of inspiration, either. There might be multiple routes to the same (theoretical) destination, and solutions designers are able to weigh up the options, and decide on the most fruitful path forward.
Consultancy
Consultancy is a bit of a specialist area, whereby independent professionals with specific skills are drafted in to help businesses out. Often these relate to issues outside of the day-to-day operations; potentially when a business might want to implement a process change, or upskill staff in a specific area.
Sales and Marketing
Logistics is no good if it can’t connect with customers who need the services our sector provides. That’s where sales and marketing comes in – the first step in that fruitful relationship. It’s the shiny shop window of the industry, showing off all the fantastic stuff we can do today, and the services we could provide tomorrow too.
Operations Excellence
Perhaps one of the most diverse areas of logistics, operations excellence is a multi-disciplinary grouping of roles united by a common objective to support and improve upon day-to-day operations. It’s not necessarily doing the doing; it’s more analysing and educating so that everything can be done a little better.
Finance
Broadly speaking this is the measurement and management of the money. It involves making sure that a logistics business is in good business health, that profits and margins are sustainable, and that the whole operation is as financially lean as possible.