From Planner to Director: What a Real Logistics Career Path Looks Like

In this episode of Rozmowy Logistyków, Piotr Skobało and Adam Sobolewski discuss their own career paths in logistics — from specialist level, through the first management roles, up to director positions. They consider what promotion in this industry actually depends on, and whether it's always worth thinking about growth within a single company.

YOUR FIRST ROLE IS RARELY SOMETHING TO REGRET

Both hosts landed in logistics with no plan — one through a three-month internship at Whirlpool, the other by winning a contest for a demand-forecasting internship at Avon. Starting from a basic specialist or planner role isn't a bad start — the better you know the work from the operational side, the easier it is to manage increasingly larger areas later. An added bonus: experience in logistics, a function that supports the whole company, makes it easier to find common ground with sales or finance — and it means good people from logistics get poached into other departments.

YOU HAVE TO ALREADY BE DOING THE JOB BEFORE YOU GET IT

A painful but proven rule: promotion comes after you start genuinely doing more than your formal job scope, not before. A real example: a demand planning manager noticed his results depended on how the distribution center was running — so he started analyzing its productivity, mapping process times, and managing the center's work together with its team. His scope expanded step by step, until the planning team effectively became the whole supply chain team. What you do beyond your formal scope stays with you forever — you're investing in yourself, not just in the organization.

ROTATING BETWEEN AREAS AND ORGANIZATIONS

Large corporations (like Whirlpool's former rotation model) offer the chance to deliberately build competence across different functions — planning, warehouse, transport, customer service — before taking on a role managing the whole. But no organization gives you the full spectrum of experience: deliberately moving to "the other side" (from client to logistics operator, or back to the warehouse floor after years in a management role) can be a sideways or even downward step that later opens doors higher than the most attractively worded offer. You no longer need to sit in one place for 5 years so a recruiter won't question your CV — what matters is moving "toward" a specific goal (a new area, higher pay), not "away from" a conflict with your boss.

WHAT CHANGES AT MANAGER AND DIRECTOR LEVEL

A specialist has a skill set focused on one area; a manager starts managing communication within the organization; a director formally manages a budget and has to translate their functional KPIs into the language of business impact — because no one on the board cares about logistics challenges, only the outcome. At this level, a significant share of time (sometimes 80%) goes not to logistics, but to "politics" — defending the team against unrealistic targets imposed from above, because accepting an overly ambitious target would be unfair to the people who'll have to deliver it.

THREE MYTHS TO BUST

Myth one: doing your own job well is enough — it isn't, you have to do the job one level up well, before you take on that level. Myth two: good work speaks for itself — it doesn't, you have to calmly and proactively communicate what you're doing, especially since the rest of the organization rarely understands the realities of logistics. Myth three: growth is just about executing your own area well — that leads to being good where you already are, not to moving forward.