A hot-house of expertise defining the roles and occupations.

 We need a career map for supply chain.

Logistics Skills Alliance chairman, Carl Lomas, secretary to the Express trailblazer group joined a rich attendance list from Nestlé to Royal Mail, DHL to K&N.

Guests represented rail, maritime ports & road logistics. IOC for express. RHA for LGV, FTA for warehouse and storage. Kevin Shakespear, Inst of Export talked air. The event hosted at the Institute of Apprenticeships' Coventry HQ closed with a unanimous reality. ‘We need a career map for supply chain.’

There was much discussion about terms and how the public perceived the supply chain sector.

How to fit the whole supply chain into an occupation map, did we need a career path map first ?, filling every box at every level with a standard was unlikely to be the route.

Vertical streams of hierarchy, the modes of road, rail, air and sea in the supply chain. Purchase, storage, transportation of goods.

Paul Stone, Uniserve, spoke about industry silos and gaps in the existing standards, many voids in the level 3 and 4 areas. Paul used a SCOR map, supply chain references, (Plan, source, make, deliver, return, enable) to outline the full purchase to delivery of supply chain, discussion on occupations in the chain followed.

DHL, ‘The industry struggles to articulate the complexity of our sector’

Pierre DeCarteret, Kiejos consulting, ‘Not every stream has vertical routes, we have to talk wider than apprenticeships. Is it about technical skills, supply chain is very diverse, it may be madness to map supply chain in its entirety.’

David Cormack System Training, ‘Employers want milestones to identify career paths.’

K&N, ‘every organisation needs knowledge of the business, it must not be too generic.’

Martin Keaves IFA, ‘Having more standards is not always the answer, any form of career mapping for the occupation routes woud be greatly welcomed. Give us your expertise to identify occupations in supply chain.’

Soryah Brown IFA relationship manager for transport logistics, ‘Can I encourage a single map for the supply chain sector.’