Supply Chain Saturday

I was on a coaching call recently with someone who had been teaching himself Excel, Tableau, and data visualization on his own time. He wasn't waiting for someone to hand him a curriculum. He was just going after it because he liked working with data and saw where it could take him.

Here's the thing. He had all of these skills, but when I looked at his resume and LinkedIn, you wouldn't have known it. No certifications listed. No mention of the platforms he learned on. No detail on what he could actually do with the tools.

So I asked him: do you get any kind of certification when you finish these courses? He said yeah, he did. He just hadn't thought to put them on there.

That's a missed opportunity. And it's one I see all the time.

And it makes sense. Supply chain runs on data. Every company I've worked at, the people who can take raw data, build a dashboard, spot a trend, and help the team make better decisions are the ones who move up. That's the skill set that separates a coordinator from an analyst, and an analyst from a manager.

The good news is you don't need a degree to build those skills. You don't need to spend thousands of dollars. You need to pick a tool, learn it well enough to talk about it intelligently, and put it on your resume with the certification to back it up.

I also told him something that I think is worth repeating here. A lot of people don't realize that the systems they already use at work are supply chain tools. He was using an app every day to track sales, monitor labor percentages, and pull customer satisfaction data. I asked if he'd learned about ERP systems in the course yet. He said he had. I said, that app you're using? That's basically an ERP system. You're already working in one. You just didn't know what to call it.

Here's what I'd take away from this.

If you're building skills right now, make sure the world knows about it. Every certification, every course completion, every tool you've practiced with should be visible on your resume and your LinkedIn profile. Not buried in a skills section with no context. Listed clearly, with the platform it came from and what you can actually do with it.

The tools that matter most right now in supply chain: Excel (always), Power BI, Tableau, SQL, and anything related to dashboards and data visualization. If you can build a dashboard that helps someone make a decision, you're valuable. That's it.

And if you're already using systems at work to track inventory, manage schedules, pull reports, or analyze performance, start connecting those dots. You have more tool experience than you think. Frame it that way.

Until next Saturday,
– Mark