2025 to 2026 Supply Chain Talent, Technology, and Career Outlook

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[00:00:00] Mike Ogle: Welcome to the Supply Chain Careers podcast, the only podcast for job seekers, professionals, and students who are focused on career enhancing conversations and insights across all aspects of the supply chain discipline. This podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm.

Visit SCM talent [email protected].

You know, as we dive into these 2025 issues and where we’re going in 2026 and beyond, it’s important to understand that there’s a lot of fundamentals. In supply chain that haven’t changed. We are consuming more and more services, but we still need stuff. People need, people gotta eat. People need to live somewhere.

They need to get around. They need to consume far more electricity. Supply chains have to find out where to get stuff from, suppliers, transport it, store it, make other stuff out of it, then get it to their customers. We still have to plan for growth. We still have to invest in the enabling tech, the technologies and techniques to plan and execute supply chains.

So I just wanted to provide that little bit of framing that, of course, supply chains are still supply chains, but man, is there a whole lot going on.

[00:01:25] Rodney Apple: Yeah, that’s, you hit the nail on the head, Mike, and as we’ll start going down our list here of some of the themes and trends that we’ve observed that we’re hearing from, you know, my work in the recruitment sector across all industries, all things supply chain and your work, Chris, at, at there, at Georgia Tech.

And we’ve got a, a lot of themes to cover here and one of the things that, that we keep. Seeing and hearing often is the skills gap when it comes to adoption of some of these best in class technologies. Obviously AI is open the news, that’s what you’re gonna hear. So it’s, it’s very popular. We’re gonna dive further into that.

A lot of our clients are putting in automation and robotics and, and we’ve heard our horror stories of that too, where somebody implements a solution, they get sold something by some persuasive salesperson, and then. The solution doesn’t fit into their business model. And then you’ve got millions of dollars of equipment sitting in the back corner of a warehouse.

So we’re seeing a lot of continuous transformation work, that journey, that ongoing journey where not just robotics, automation, digitizing procurement, and things like that. And we’re seeing. AI impacts some of these tasks as well, so we’re looking forward to diving into that, the skills gap and technology adoption.

Chris, I know you put something out recently that we did a podcast on the AI maturity ladder. Love your perspective on that. Now that it’s been out for a while, what are you seeing there?

[00:02:51] Chris Gaffney: I, I actually had a discussion with a company that I’ve done work with over the last four or five years, and I gave them actually one of my one hour kind of gen AI primers.

And the interesting thing that they came back with at the end was, that’s really helpful context for us, but we’re actually still way lower on this analytics maturity curve, and we still have a lot of those, whatever you want to call ’em. Singles to, to hit in our organization and we don’t necessarily have the capability to do all that yet.

So can you help us with the foundational stuff that’s out there? I, I think we clearly have a very tiered commerce network in our country and there are the few that we see that are doing, and there’s a few but big companies that are doing really progressive things, but then there’s a wide swath of companies that are still.

Needing to work on the basics and they read what you read as well, Rodney. And some of them are still reticent to jump into this stuff because their own track record of doing any transformation or change at scale is not great. So their view is, I think, still gotta work on the basics. Gotta find a way to be competitive.

Gotta think about all that stuff in the future. But some folks are saying that’s still not yet really our. And so I, I think that’s an interesting observation Through many conversations this year,

[00:04:21] Rodney Apple: where are we seeing other capability gaps? Ai, we hear that. There’s a lot of studies on this where the critical thinking is starting to slip.

When you think about that, the, there we’re just plugging in a prompt and letting chat GP two do, do the thinking for us. And so that’s starting to impact, uh, people’s critical thinking and complex decision making abilities. Any thoughts on that, Chris or Mike?

[00:04:45] Mike Ogle: I sure see it in my classes to start with.

Yeah. Students just taking the old style end of chapter problems, for instance, when you’ve tried to teach them why you’re doing a particular technique and how you do the technique and all they’re looking at is, how do I get that grade? I have an evaluation criteria, a metric that is a grade, and did I get that problem done?

Did I get it right? And, oh, there’s this great new tool that can do this for me. Boom. Next thing. I think that’s probably going to happen a lot in industry and I talk to them about that as well. But they need to be able to understand that if they don’t continue to grow, then they will end up facing a, a barrier one of these days with an employer or a customer, and it will be a problem for them.

So. The ability to absorb it and adopt it to even understand what they need to know, I think is where I’m seeing a gap right now. And it’s both with students and faculty.

[00:05:47] Chris Gaffney: Yeah, I, I am absolutely seeing it in industry. I had a discussion with a client last week and the context of the discussion was actually change management, which is still in, in great need, but their client was a planner and.

Some of the things that we would think about of basics in supply chain planning, which is you’ve gotta devote some time and effort to a very near end horizon, and then, which might be next week, production, scheduling, and satisfying orders. Next week focus on 30 to 60 to 90 days, but this client was dealing with someone who had a paradigm that said, we’re really not gonna worry about the three to 12 month horizon.

There’s another group of people who worry about next year and beyond, and that. Rationalization was we want stability, but instead of looking at it, their rationale for stability was, let’s just not look at it at all. And then when we get there with software, it’s back to critical thinking, a recognition that some of the fires that they have today in this near term horizon could have been seen and dealt with and mitigated by having a share of time and effort focused on that midterm horizon, which has been an issue in many companies throughout my.

My career. So I think this idea of critical thinking is not a trivial thing. It’s not unique to ai, but it’s still out there, and that’s what we think. You can teach that and we think you can counteract that, but it requires some intention

[00:07:16] Mike Ogle: along with the critical thinking side, the. Experiencing it, living it, even from a very basic level of stepping into operations or having to perform some analysis.

The problems that you get into and understanding where are the roadblocks and how do I make my way to a solution, work with other people and integrate all that stuff together. There’s. No substitute still for experience. If you’re going to try to develop that critical thinking skill, you’ve got to be, as they say, way too often, punched in the mouth in a way and try to get through the process of working towards solutions.

And that is a fundamental skill that I think is waning with a reliance on ai.

[00:08:00] Chris Gaffney: Yeah, I, I think it’s an interesting thing. We live in a technical field. We have, we have gaps in technical areas, but the soft skills continue to be the differentiator. And I use an analogy that’s like climbing the ladder, that if you’re staying in the same place on the ladder, the water level’s gonna rise and ultimately catch up with you.

So you’ve gotta continue to go up additional rungs. But that investment to go up those rungs has gotta be both on the technical side and the soft skills side, because you need both to be able to compete. And if you have some fear. That you have to stand out. You’ve gotta stand out in both dimensions.

[00:08:37] Rodney Apple: Let’s shift gears. Looking at, we can talk about the macro level labor market, right? Obviously it’s softening across the board. And then we can dive further into the supply chain side of that and maybe talk cover some of the industries too. But labor shortages, attrition. We know the great resignation was a huge movement as folks are working from home and focused on quality of life and work-life balance.

We’ve seen that as we say, that pendulum. Shifts from year to year, from employer to to the employee. And markets cool down, but there’s still great needs within supply chain. The enabler of commerce, as we’ve talked about, the things that we’re seeing, at least from my little corner of the world as we have now, what, 25 years into recruiting and end end supply chain, we, we pretty much touch all industries, re manufacturing, retail, wholesale.

All the slew of service providers out there, three pls and so forth, but it’s, there’s still great needs out there. On one hand, we’re also seeing just inundation of people that are looking for work impacted by layoffs. A lot of the big corporations that we see them kind of being the early adapters of the layoffs, getting out in front of it.

And the restructuring is always taking place. So we can certainly live that in the large corporations that I worked at. And, but we, we had a very busy year and if anything, the volume was up in terms of needs and it’s hard to tie it to a function. ’cause I feel like we worked on things across the end in supply chain.

Now when you think about job level. We’ve definitely seen a pretty big shift from, as we work full service, lower level roles mid-level up to the C-suite, we’ve got C-O-O-A-C-S-C-O search we’re working on now, we’re, we’re seeing a big shift where, you know, the leadership roles are. The in the middle management arena and up are really the ones that are, where companies are struggling right now.

They don’t have that feeder pool in place, and my perspective is that we just didn’t pump enough folks into supply chain and that, you know, last call, 10 to 20 year range and we’re solving that problem now with all the universities back then. What six? Six to eight that we’re teaching supply chain and related programs today.

Mike, hold me honest here, I think 125 or more have supply chain degree programs, so we’re solving the talent gaps that were back in the day. Planners, demand. Planners notoriously difficult to find. Data analyst and things like that. We’ve got that I think taken care of. But we miss that generational gap there and I think that’s what’s leading to your middle management is, is a lot of folks are exiting the workforce.

In particular baby boomer, the baby boomer generation. So I’d love to hear Chris, Mike, your thoughts on those dynamics. I think a couple

[00:11:20] Chris Gaffney: things, uh, Rodney that I would comment on. Is cream steel rises to the top. One of the things you and I have talked about this year in terms of why we’re continuing to see search focus is people are looking to upgrade.

The game that they’re being asked to play is more complex, and so it’s like the NIL world of football. They’re like, Nope, we’ve gotta upskill. We need a higher caliber quarterback than we had, and we might have to go hunt for it. We might have to pay for it. I think that’s going on. As these companies say our competition is doing different things and or we failed when we’ve tried to do new things.

So we need people who are capable of actually delivering more complex things. So all those areas of the supply chain that used to be in macro demand. What’s in demand now are the best of the people who have really invested in their capabilities, who have been exposed to Mike, as Mike talked about, to not only the frontline but the new tech.

So if you’ve done work in automation implementation somewhere, someone’s gonna ask you if it was successful, can you do it in another place and at greater scale? So I think that’s clearly. One of the things that’s going on, we have our old line areas of manufacturing. Even though macro manufacturing is not adding jobs, manufacturing management is always looking for people out there.

And then I think in the classic supply chain roles, whether it be logistics warehouse who are planning, they’re looking for people who are good at execution, but also understand how to do the analytical side of it. So again, back to. Back to differentiating, right? We’re gonna get to, so what’s enduring is investing in yourself, right?

Your best protection in a time of change is building your own skills and capabilities. So if your world changes, then you can compete for the new things that are out there. I think the only other thing I would say is I think this year’s market has shown us that you’ve gotta be more agile, whether it’s to move to a new industry.

If you are out of work and you were geographically anchored, once you’ve scoured all the employers in your geography, then you may need to open up your lens a little bit depending on what your criticality is

[00:13:34] Mike Ogle: during this short break. We recognize that this podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm. Visit SCM talent [email protected].

Yeah, constantly upskilling and now cos skilling as you try to adopt your bots and agents and even just basic gen AI of being able to try to develop you as a team. And being able to use those kinds of tools to make that happen, I think is something that we all need to be able to learn how to do better.

And we’re in the very, very early innings to keep using the sports analogies of what’s happening in that area. We don’t really know how to do it well yet, but it’s a school, a skill. We’re all going to have to adopt. And one other thought I wanted to toss in there is that I was listening to what you were talking about, Chris, of the stars and the NIL money and that side of things we’ve heard about the khap economy, the people who are on top being able to make more, and the people on the bottom who are face saving, facing even greater challenges to be able to make things work well.

Whatever your background was that got you into that position. Both on the positive side and the negative side of not having certain advantages maybe growing up, or people that pushed you in a direction to, to try to achieve. There’s a K shape that’s there as well on the training and the background that you’re able to be exposed to, and I think it’s gonna cause a lot more problems as we go forward, but it really emphasizes those people with the critical.

Thinking the systems level thinking and experience are going to be high priced athletes.

[00:15:29] Rodney Apple: Great perspective perspectives. You guys are both, Mike, you’re at App State and Chris at Georgia Tech and we’re, we’re certainly seeing some trends. The tier one universities and supply chain, Michigan State, Penn State, usual suspects there are Arkansas, or as we covered on a prior podcast, seem to be at current placement rates as far as, yeah, Michigan

[00:15:50] Mike Ogle: State was on that one as well.

[00:15:51] Rodney Apple: Exactly. Michigan State. That’s right. Yep. And what are we seeing today and what do we anticipate that we’ll see going into 2026? We’ve talked about ai that’s. Displacing or able to do some of these core tasks that these entry level supply chain roles typically have taken in years. Companies are still wanting a few years of experience, so we have a little bit of a conundrum there.

Anything you wanna speak to there and. Concerns risk. And how do you overcome, if you’re someone that’s getting ready to wrap up your degree in supply chain, maybe not in a tier one, but maybe you’re at a tier two or tier three. And how does this impact the overall workforce when you think about grooming future leaders and things like that?

[00:16:32] Mike Ogle: Yeah, yeah. I, I think we’re gonna have to have a whole lot more. Emphasis on how we develop that middle level of students, for instance. ’cause we still have no problem with the upper level of students. I sometimes divide ’em into three pieces. At the risk of saying this on a podcast, you know about the 20%.

On the top level, they’re gonna have no issues. They think they adopt the tools, they’ve got a good background. There’s a, and then there, there’s a bottom level that, I’m not sure, maybe 20, 30% that I’m not sure where their future is, just based on what they’re proving in school. But that sometimes that’s just a level of maturity and a point in life.

It’s that middle group that I grow increasingly concerned about. Of what are they doing to be able to get themselves anywhere close to that upper group and be able to perform with the new tools that are available and get the jobs going forward? There’s a great uncertainty right now that’s going on, of course, and a pause in a way.

With various things that are happening, but that’s gonna calm down, I think in 2026, and we’re gonna get a better picture of what’s really going to happen with AI replacement, with uncertainty in the business world as far as the global flow of goods and tariffs and et cetera. So there’s a lot that’s going to get shaken out.

I think in 2026. That 2025 has proven to be a great disruption.

[00:18:06] Chris Gaffney: What I would say that I am seeing from students is that they’ve received feedback. It’s a bit of a paradox. It’s, we know your students, but we need you to be able to hit the ground running when you come here. So we need you to demonstrate that you’ve already done stuff right.

So we see a lot more students looking for any type of applied experience. During school? Yes. The traditional internship? Yes, the co-op. We have students looking for applied industry projects within a normal semester and they say, can you find me something where I can work for somebody for 10 hours a week, and in some cases I don’t need to get paid.

We had a hundred students to internships this fall for free. That were bound at 10 hours a week, which is very different. I’m not sure if it continues or not, but I could just see the students have heard that they need this domain applied experience and as opposed to the old days where somebody would say, we’re gonna train you for X period of time.

They need to be able to demonstrate that they can walk in and drive ROI almost instantly. And that’s the other thing that I think is important for students is we need that They are being asked to say, we need you to be comfortable with a work environment. An industry work environment, show hard, show up, or show up early, work well in teams, all those things, day one to continue to compete.

So that’s a big theme as I look at students and at Georgia Tech, we still do a nice job clearing the market, but it’s changing. It is tightening up. So we are also guiding students to be very open to where they will go to work, to get that hands-on experience that internship at a. Non-brand name company early on may be really important for them to have enough on their resume that their second or third year they can get a name brand internship.

And the combination of those two will be what will be required to have enough experience. So I think that’s, at least in our environment, they’re hearing us that they, you’ve gotta have the supply domain experience in order to be able to compete in the job market. And I think that’s, to me gonna be a continuing 26 trend.

[00:20:21] Rodney Apple: Great perspectives. We’ll have to see how this unfolds as we get into 2026. And if we’re that bottom layer, if we’re, I feel like we’re hollowing that that ring and what are we gonna do? Where’s that talent bench gonna come from? When you start looking at the middle layers and rising on up from, you could get back into a situation like we’re seeing now with.

Middle management leaders, there are a lot of gaps there, especially transformational leaders that can adopt these new technologies and automation like we’ve covered. But it’s gonna be interesting to see how this plays out in the future and hopefully industry and the associations and everyone can come together and and solve this ’cause we just don’t know where AI is gonna go and in the future, but it’s certainly is rapidly evolving

[00:21:04] Mike Ogle: and I think it really emphasizes that need for.

A clear development plan that companies can show that to people coming in. So if you’re trying to get a star performer who does have some of that background, they’ve got internships, they’ve got some experience, they did well in school, those kinds of things, it’s gonna become more important for companies to have a very clear development plan to attract those students if they want the stars.

[00:21:33] Rodney Apple: Absolutely, and this could be a big springboard too. Rotational programs, leadership development programs have been around for quite some time. Unfortunately, not a lot of employers are adapting them. They take time. You, you have to have the right resources in place. An example, working on a VP of supply chain role for a food and beverage company in in Minnesota and.

Came across an interesting candidate from a, a who’s, whose name you’d recognize on the shelves. I won’t mention it right now, but her role, she had a role for about five years where she was, and it’s just a supply chain person too. She’s not HR talent like myself, but she was put into a, a role and it’s a rotational role in itself and it is the managing the internship program.

So that ear, the early feeders coming into, into the supply chain department. And then they had, they had quite a few, pretty, pretty mature rotational program. And they were rotating folks around the different functions, and then they would get placed somewhere. So that’s been around for a while, of course, but I was impressed that they had very dedicated resources.

Of course, large companies have those resources, but I think we need to find a way to distill that down into the mid-size companies and smaller employers so that those tasks that are getting replaced by ai, we can at least rotate them around, accelerate their learning throughout the supply chain, throughout the organization, develop that business acumen and hopefully.

Get them well-rounded enough so they don’t lose out to AI and can make that transition quicker.

[00:23:01] Chris Gaffney: Yeah. Again, my guidance to both employers and employees is, as I said before, this is a pretty complex layer cake of our supply chain and our economy. There are plenty of companies that are still years away from ai, but somebody who is really good.

With large sets of data and can crank through that in Tableau or Power BI and drive insights for value can have a tremendous impact on a smaller company. And I’ve told stories where we’ve had students in a summer internship save people a hundred times what they’re getting paid. And so I, I encourage the smaller companies to take a bet on a person who they may say, I could never afford someone at one of these tier one schools.

Bring them in. Don’t need all the structure that you might think and maybe a fabulous ROI for both the employee and the employer. So encourage folks to stay in the game and be more open-minded in terms of where their opportunity and their talent might lie.

[00:23:58] Mike Ogle: Yeah, I think that brings up a great point about, about data and emphasizing that knowing where it comes from, how to get it, how to understand whether it’s good and valid.

To feed it into the system. ’cause of course, making decisions on bad data just helps you make mistakes faster. An old automation thing that we used to be taught years ago. So having that understanding of how to get data and part of that getting data these days is being able to get past the different firewalls between companies and be able to collaborate with others and how you share data and under what kinds of conditions those kinds of things need to be taught just as well.

[00:24:41] Rodney Apple: Switch gears again. Companies are under a lot of pressure right now. Inflation is, has not, is still there. We, and I’ll just give an example in my case is we’re getting, like most companies on a calendar fiscal year, it’s the time of year you’re sitting down, you’re looking at budgets and how’s the year gonna wind down?

Where are margins gonna come out? And. You look at that, you’re like had a pretty good year. But I think some of these costs have certainly impacted ours is, but our little small company and we’re seeing that across the board as we talk to our clients. And so that cost to serve that margin pressure is definitely a huge deal right now.

And the sad thing I’m seeing, I’ve gotten some slips notifications in the mail. Usually I’ll get one here and there and we work with hundreds of clients, but I’m just a small perspective. But I’m seeing those bankruptcy bankruptcy slips come through that. I’ve seen at least three or four in the last month from some of our clients.

So that’s a little scary when you say, oh wow, it looks like this coffee company. We work with that, and I haven’t even opened it yet, but I know what it is and it’s gonna tell me about what they’re going through. Just the typical process there filing for bankruptcy, but I. What are you guys seeing?

Companies have exhausted the low hanging fruit. If you want to be competitive and gain efficiencies, you know, really have to adapt these digital technologies and get better with your analytics. Make sure you’ve got carrying the right SKUs and inventory and tightening that up. But anything you wanna speak to there, maybe give some nuggets of wisdom so companies may can think about as they start planning for next year.

[00:26:06] Chris Gaffney: I think the number one thing I’ve seen, and I’ve had discussions again with what you would say, name brand companies. A lot of them when they say they’ve exhausted opportunities, they’ve done it the old fashioned way, very silo focused, and go to each functional team and say, squeeze water out of your own rock.

But in every one of those cases, there’s usually something they say, if this other group could do this, we could do this. But they’re not culturally doing it in a cross-functional way. Same industry. One of the great success stories I’ve heard this year, which was validated by a completely different case, was doing a much better job of understanding shorter term demand, that informed labor scheduling so that a client didn’t have too much labor on a given shift and basically had under utilization of that labor or didn’t plan enough.

Either orders didn’t get out or they had to crank a bunch of overtime, and just that exercise, which was a little bit of analytics, not anything super leading edge, but just better use of sales and operations, SNOE and SNOP routines to say, what’s coming next week? What do we think the days are gonna look like as it’s balancing within days, and these guys are reigning money.

So I think the answer is. That this is a huge priority for people, but ironically, the way it’s getting delivered is, yes, a little analysis, but a lot of soft skills in terms of how we collaborate up and down the supply chain. And I’ve had the same discussion with people about suppliers. I need some leeway with you.

What can I do in my interaction with you critical supplier to help you be more effective so that you and I can both be competitive and I can keep ordering for you? That’s, to me, that’s what’s differentiating, and again, that goes back to the type of talent that’s gonna be winning. People who have those stories, people will be, are clamoring for those type of people because the pressure is real.

[00:28:09] Mike Ogle: Yeah, an interesting thing to toss in there. My wife teaches high school. I’m teaching at a university, and as the years go by, students becoming increasingly less engaging. In, in being able to make the kinds of relationships and talk to people who aren’t in their inner circle of friends. And so I have a little bit of a concern where we’re going on trying to make sure that they have those kinds of experiences where they can have those kind conversations and have the interactions and the reason why I bring all that up.

Is this cross border, cross function, cross company collaboration kind of skill. The ability to talk with others and convince them and work your way towards a a collaborative arrangement is still of great importance to me, and I’m struggling with how to make that happen within classes and give them that kind of experience.

[00:29:11] Chris Gaffney: I recall the old movie, the Paper Chase, and it was a law school class, and the professor was actually not teaching law. He was teaching how they had to work together to be successful. So yes, I do think it’s still modeled best in cross-functional projects where we encourage students to get involved in these out of class clubs and other things on campus because that’s where it’s done, even in student government and that type of thing.

And it may sound res, resonate, fluff, and or. Non-essential stuff, but I still contend that 50% of the learning is outside of the traditional CA classroom setting

[00:29:49] Mike Ogle: during this short break. We recognize that this podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm. Visit SCM talent [email protected].

[00:30:06] Rodney Apple: Well, let’s dive into a hot topic these days. We’ve certainly had some folks on our podcast and on the topic of risk management, and it’s moving from, uh, or behind the scenes and the back burner to the front burner, and it really is becoming a core competency. If you, and if you wanna listen to a great one, David Schilling firm from Everstream Analytics, that’s a.

That’s one of the better pods on this topic, so we encourage you to go back and check that out. Chris, what are your thoughts? I know you talked to a lot of people in this area, but uh, what are we seeing in terms of ongoing trends and. Maybe you know what to think about for next year.

[00:30:39] Chris Gaffney: Yep. I strongly advocate in this space doing something is better than nothing.

And this is another example of a maturity area. If you haven’t done anything, the first thing you need to do is good. We do good weather planning. Most businesses are impacted by hurricanes and tornadoes in some respects or another. So planning seasonally for that is a good start. I think this is best done now having seen it for 30 years done within supply chain or led within supply chain planning organizations.

So back to differentiating. If you’re in a supply chain planning organization and you wanna stand out, make sure that in the spring of this year you say, let’s get a good head start on our seasonal planning and. Do something very basic that is not a huge investment in time and effort, and then build from there.

And I follow David religiously. What Everstream does is top of the heap for Fortune 50 and Fortune a hundred companies, but there’s still many foundational things in risk awareness, and then risk mitigation that are at the fingertips of small companies in large. We’ve done a lot of work in the state of Georgia talking to local businesses around this very basic effort, and I literally say to the CEOs, spend an afternoon a quarter on this, three hours, four times a year.

The preparation by your key planning, manufacturing, logistics, procurement, quality people can be measured in few hours and then start. Start with the basics there, but I think that’s the message for hiring managers. Or and leaders, but for the frontline employees, just be an advocate to say, let’s do something a little basic this year.

Use the AI tools that are open source to help us. You can impact your business materially in terms of preparing for these increasing disruptions, and you can show that you’ve taken the initiative, brought some new thinking into your team.

[00:32:34] Mike Ogle: Yeah, I, I love this topic because I, I think it’s one of the things that we’re pushing harder is insurance and other things start to rule the world, while they always have to some extent, but you think about the likelihood of things that are happening, the speed at which they’re happening, and the greater impact.

That they’re having your reaction time isn’t what it used to be, so you better be prepared rather than trying to put everybody together on a a, something that takes days or weeks or months to be able to figure out. What to do it about it. Have people on your team that have those kinds of skills and everybody needs to have some extent of those skills, but you really almost have to have a chief risk management officer that’s in your supply chain team.

[00:33:20] Rodney Apple: Yeah, I would add a term. I’ve heard just recently a scenario architect. I think in the old days we didn’t have all these supply chain disruptions. Okay, what’s this Is option A, this might happen. B, maybe there’s a c. Potentially a D, you know? And now there’s a whole litany of scenarios that you have to think about, what if scenarios and have a plan for in case they happen.

And tariffs are a good example. Lots of uncertainty. You can’t plan with all the uncertainty, so you have to go deeper and broader when you think about the what ifs and how you might react as an organization and not just any one function really across all the functions ’cause. That’s what supply chain is.

It’s systemic, it’s all connected. And you gotta be thinking about not just your tier one supplier, but go deeper into the tier two and tier three. ’cause you know what would happen if one of their key suppliers goes down And yeah. That’s an interesting, that, that ought to become a job title. It probably will become a job title here.

I wouldn’t be surprised. We see that at, at some point.

[00:34:13] Mike Ogle: One of the things that, that we’ve seen, and especially in 2025, a little bit of change in administration, I think it, but there’s other issues that go along with it, is that ESG sustainability kinds of issues really aren’t as important as. As they used to be.

And in 2025 they’ve been diminished and there’s almost a little bit of shaming if you’re diving too deep into those that you’re not paying attention to the business the way that you should. But I think in 2026, it will ease off the pressure a little bit, but it’s gonna take probably a transition of several more years before we really start getting back into ESG and sustainability.

Yeah, and you

[00:34:52] Rodney Apple: hear about advancements in technology sometimes can lead to people using it for. For bad things, right? Not the good, the greater good. And so cybersecurity, digital vulnerabilities, we implement these advanced solutions. There’s a, the whole new era of hackers coming online and obviously cargo theft continues to be a, a huge problem.

And I think we’ll just continue to see. This moving into 2026 and I think you’ll also start seeing some innovation in this area where, how do we combat and thwart the, these folks that are out there trying to, to scam and make a buck and and so forth. ’cause supply chain is very exposed and there’s a lot of movement of not just products, but financials that go from company to company.

And so we’ll continue to keep an eye on that. Yeah, it’s a good career area to pursue for sure. It certainly has advanced beyond the basic like loss prevention that you think about. Still critical. A lot of retailers are un unfortunately dealing with that. It’s a full-time job for all the army of people in the retail sector, but we’re seeing that also move into other areas on cargo side and freight and so forth.

Let’s talk about talent shifts. When you think about geography and we, the reshoring, the near shoring, obviously these tariffs are designed to, to bring manufac factoring back. And we’ve certainly have covered in the past, like, where are we gonna find all these manufacturing engineers and leaders? And it takes years to open up factories, big investments.

But maybe Chris, kick us off there with what you’re seeing and hearing.

[00:36:23] Chris Gaffney: I think the large retailers have had to move the fastest because they’ve had to keep things on the shelves, and that’s where the knowledge base has been gained this year. When I look at people I talk to again at places we all shop, and what they thought things would look like at the beginning of the year for Christmas and how things turned out, they demonstrated unbelievable agility, resilience.

Creativity, working with current suppliers and new suppliers to bounce sourcing around the world and to, in all honesty, put a lot of pressure on existing suppliers. So I think it’s occurring much more rapidly in that area that the consumer can actually see. Even though the prices are higher, things are on the shelf and we haven’t seen massive availability issues.

I think the other bigger macro shifts are. Gonna continue to inexorably, move forward and they are gonna occur. We’re seeing a lot of pressure now beyond what we heard about chips and that type of thing. The federal government is putting out a lot of funds for research in the whole area of critical minerals.

That’s a five or 10 year trend. Uh, they’re doing it all with a desire to do public private, so that stimulates. Local, mid and small size businesses. So that’s probably the biggest pivot that I’m seeing, that if somebody said, I’ve gotta find a new place to go, I’d jump into that area as an example.

[00:37:54] Rodney Apple: What about future proofing skills?

We know AI is coming in, as we’ve talked about over and over, as impacting jobs and doing tasks just as well humans can do, if not better in some cases. But if I’m coming up the ranks, what are you, what should we be thinking about to build in some resiliency, become more adaptable? Cross training is always important.

We talked about leadership development and basically future proofing yourself so you don’t have to worry about your job getting impacted, but anything you want to cover there, maybe Chris, start out. Yep.

[00:38:25] Chris Gaffney: I think everybody has to be coming up that analytics ladder no matter where you are. Individual contributor, manager.

Expectation that people can be more self-sufficient analytically, I don’t think it’s gonna go away. So I think that’s important. Technically, to Mike’s point, anything you can do to continue to gain context around physical supply chains, if you’re in a supply chain, you need to be. Comfortable with the fact that you need to be close to the goal face again, no matter who you are.

I’ve seen very senior people in the warehouse this year wanting to understand how new technology might work, so don’t shy away from that. And then I think soft scale wise, I think communication. If I had to put my bet in one place, I acknowledge what we’ve talked about already with critical thinking, cross-functional collaboration.

Those are yes, but all aspects of communication. Um, and that includes communication, going out and coming in. Are you able to listen? Are you able to pause in a multi-stakeholder conversation, not occupy the airtime, but listen to what’s being said? Take that down, act on it. Those would be a couple key points for me.

[00:39:34] Mike Ogle: Yeah. That’s one of those aspects that I think is the ongoing angst with from CEO down to entry level people of just being able to understand. If I’m not in an office somewhere. And having the direct interactions that you used to have, how are you developing some of those skills in the way that you could now, the reality is of course, that a whole lot of interaction is happening internationally at all kinds of different times of day, all kinds of different personalities and backgrounds and people.

So you just have to practice it. Your brain has to get trained into. How do I help them understand my perspective? How do I understand their perspective and how do we reach a conclusion that’s going to work for us? So I, I love that whole communication side of things and being able to do it in a data rich, reliable data stand background, that you have the ammunition in hand in a way to be able to defend, support, and make your point.

[00:40:39] Rodney Apple: Absolutely, and I’ll just layer in understanding how does our business make money and where does the, the financial levers is always critical, especially as you move up further in the organization and as we’ve covered over and over, the leadership and the transformational ability to influence up and down is gonna be critical.

So the more versatile takeaway here is the more versatile you are and the more you’re focused on the mindset of a growth mindset and always be learning the better odds you have to move up and be more resilient in your career.

[00:41:09] Mike Ogle: Yeah, that’s a fantastic point, Rodney. I think people need to be able to understand how to make those connections and in making those connections one of the best ways of being able to get somebody talking, whether it’s your bosses, people from other functions, clients, suppliers, whatever it’s is, asking them about their pain points and being able to understand what, what matters to them.

And especially one of the things I emphasize to my students is that when you ask. Up different levels and you’re showing a concentration on what are those pain points, what are the bigger issues? What they’re automatically looking at is they’re thinking of you as a higher level thinker, and that’s going to be nothing but good for your career when you ask those kinds of questions.

Mike,

[00:42:00] Rodney Apple: we’ll close this out. Just we’re gonna end on the themes that we’re seeing in at the macro level. There’s big shifts going on across the broader labor market. We just looked at the jobs report that came out this week. More of the same, didn’t look so hot. We’ve talked about the great resignation that occurred during the pandemic, and that’s pretty much over.

So now we’re seeing a shift to employees are the big stay, or we’ve heard that term. It’s always somebody coming up with these terms, a job hugging, I’ve got a job, I’m gonna keep the job, and, and that people are looking to upgrade. And, and then those that are worried about, okay, we’ve had one round of layoffs, there may be more coming.

Those are the ones that are getting out in front and, and trying to position themselves for other opportunities is again, scenario planning, plan B, plan C. They’re staying longer just because of the economic uncertainty. Hiring rates are slipping and the job switching to to make a premium is going away.

It’s not as lucrative as it once was before when talent shortages were in were bigger than they are now. What else do you do we have here that we want to cover? Just thinking about macro level trends and why does this matter to supply chain?

[00:43:11] Mike Ogle: I’d like to toss in something that’s gonna focus on automation, not just ai.

When you think about robotics and other kinds of tools, it’s just going to slowly but surely get built into all kinds of different things, and it won’t be that you’re interacting with an ai. You, you will to some extent, but you won’t even know it, of where things are coming from. Automation is just gonna continue to grow like crazy, and it has been in every kind of physical and non-physical way.

And one of the little. Thing that I wanted to toss in here was to say that I think in 2026 and beyond, we’re gonna see more and more gig work. If people don’t want to take the chance on hiring the employee themselves, they’re going to contract out a tremendous amount of work. And being able to be a trusted individual who can perform in gig work and build up a resume that way is not what we did in the past, but there’s gonna be a whole lot more of that in the future, I believe.

[00:44:11] Rodney Apple: I, I agree. Firmly we’re start, we’re seeing a bigger demand. I’ve been, we’ve been talking about this for years. Like the, our largest generations is three, four years to hit full retirement age. And Chris, I know you’ve got a cohort, folks we worked with at Koch that have been doing this fractional and interim consulting, going back into their networks and suppliers and things like that.

I know you’ve done some of that yourself before you landed it at Georgia Tech, but it, it sounds like that’s gonna be bigger as more. A bigger trend is more folks exit the workforce and find out that, hey, I don’t have to be on this hamster wheel till I’m 65. I can go out and mean, I’ve got plenty of friends that are doing this today.

They’ve left and are consulting and making just as much, if not more, with a stronger work-life balance. So those project, a lot of project work is we implement technology automation and you need a lot of experts to help do that and move from one project to another. Anything you want to add, Chris, before we wrap that up?

[00:45:04] Chris Gaffney: I would just say that is ticking back up. I’ll just say that as I would tell you, and I’d just reemphasize some of the points. We’ve said intentional development. Planning is really critical. Going into 2026, where can you get better? Where can you differentiate? Where can you stand out? Take the actions, and it’s probably gonna be a bumpy road, but if you’re in a good situation, solidify that.

And if you need to change your situation, invest in your own capabilities, and I’d leave it there.

[00:45:33] Rodney Apple: Yeah, and I would say if you’re an employer, get creative. The best employers out there are always looking for when it comes to their supply chain talent and workforce strategies. Don’t let this, okay, we’re good now.

We can find people anywhere. The best employers right now are still looking to upgrade and, and that’s certainly keeping us busy, so I’ll leave it

[00:45:51] Mike Ogle: with that. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Supply Chain Careers podcast. Be sure to listen to other episodes and sign up to be notified when future episodes are released as we continue to interview industry leading supply chain experts.

This podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm. Visit SCM Talent [email protected].