Video Transcript

Jacob, Host at Logistics Degree:
Answer: How much of the skills that you need in your career did you learn in school versus how much you pick it up on the job?

Corben, Supply Chain Manager:
Answer: I learned a broad foundation of everything in school, and so they introduce you to a lot of different concepts. But then when the rubber meets the road, you end up actually finding where you’re going to niche down or specialize in. And so from there, then you have to actually go deeper. So since I’m a freelancer on my own, I don’t have a company saying go through our program or, you know, take this course. So I found one. Either I’m just on YouTube for free or on Udemy. Udemy becomes a great resource that I highly recommend. So that’s great if you’re on your own or you just want to level up your skills in general. So that’s a great way to show your employer take an initiative or just to get ahead on your own. So yeah, you learn some in school, they introduce you to concepts, but then you’ve always got to follow up with it once you hit the real world. And that’s true in most industries, I think.

Alexander, Supply Chain & Procurement:
Answer: I think a lot of the skills that I learn, a lot of the personality skills was through my work, like how to talk to people, how to write professional emails, how to get my idea across, how to be let down, when an idea of mine isn’t necessarily that good, how to take opportunities. They I think school really just prepared us for that first basic knowledge of, OK, we’re going to be learning for the rest of our lives. And this is a little basic understanding of what you need to know, at least to understand the next part. Whenever you get into a job. So I think it’s just getting us in that supply chain mindset and what we’re going to be seeing every day, rather than giving us the full skills that we need to become successful in our job because nobody’s just going to graduate college and become successful at any job. It’s the meaning and wanting to need to learn every single day.

William, Director of Operations:
Answer: I think the framework you pick up in school and then, you know, one of the and this is why I like teaching. I think this is probably why I get good teaching jobs is closing that gap between what you learn, the framework and what’s real world. So in school, you’re going to learn, like I said, the framework. You’re going to learn all the terms and what happens. And then when you get into the real world, everything will be just like that, except a lot more. Slang systems is always a big gap because everybody has their own system and there’s like 900 of them. But if you can learn one, and this is the great thing, you can learn all the rest if you just kind of know the background.

Nathan, Logistician:
Answer: It’s definitely a mix of both getting a degree in school health. One of the biggest things with that is degrees for you to focus on a problem and solve it. And one of the biggest challenge with supply chain is that in school you’re going to get a very high level overview, but a job, especially in a large corporation, you’re extremely focused on one thing.

Haley, Logistics Project Manager:
Answer: I would say definitely the majority is on the job. But my major, I think, prepared me to think in the way that I could learn on the job, if that makes sense. So I learned a lot of theoretical things in school, but I think the biggest thing I learned in college was how to think critically and work through things that I’ve never been exposed to before. And that’s the type of mindset for a job like logistics, supply chain, operations, whatever it is to be successful. Knowing how to think critically about things that you don’t know and understand.