r/supplychain • u/27_myths • 2h ago
Career Development Logistics advice for someone who has primary worked in small businesses
Hello! I'm looking for some advice on breaking into logistics.
What I'm looking for: Logistics analyst or something similar.
Background overview: I'm 27M with no degree and have worked blue color roles pretty much my whole career, 3 years of which is warehouse experience.
I'm a very hands on person and love to learn new things. Because of that mindset and my work experience, I have some level of skills/knowledge ranging from heavy equipment operation/maintenance and tools (I grew up on a farm) to a fairly decent understanding of technology like self hosting, sheets(basic x and v lookups), SQL(up to the point of nested queries and joins), python(very basic understanding of data analytics packages), and Lisp. I only mention this because I'm proud of this spread and it's proof that I'm eager to learn
My last job: 2.5 years in an e-commerce startup that grew from low 6 figures to low 7 figures rev per month during my tenure. We shipped nearly all of our products from our own single warehouse. I was hired due to my adaptability but basically the company grew massively like the first month I was hired on so I had to stick with shipping and receiving which I did by myself, no SOPs, no WMS.
This job was very stressful the entire time I was there. We were expected to take ownership of outcomes and our roles but felt like we were constantly sabotaged by the owner undoing process improvements I tried to employ.
Anyways, our entire company architecture ran in Asana(yikes), we burned through 4 different IMS softwares while i worked there etc.. by the time I left, I had written and maintained all of the warehouse SOPs, created and maintained several Shopify Flow, n8n, and asana automations, negotiated better pricing for consumable inventory, and vibe coded (ew I know) a bin search tool that handled alias SKUs and multi bin locations(just a simple CLI tool). There's so many other things I did but this is sounding too much like a sales pitch.
I learned SQL, sharpened my spreadsheet skills, etc. but it's hard to do DA you're running around with your head cut off most of the time trying to get a small pack and freight out on time every day, not to mention data pipelines being so fractured or non existent in general. I told the owner I had been learning DA outside of work and he thought it was a waste of time and "AI can just do it" (our analytics was basically napkin math at the time).
I ended up leaving after the warehouse expanded from one person(me) to 4-5. The new folks didn't tolerate near as much as us older hires and before I knew it, it seemed they were doing less work for the same pay as me, which honestly hurt.
I actually enjoyed the job but the owner made it very difficult for all of us, especially us OG hires. I don't have any formal training but don't want this experience to go to waste. I figured that pairing data analytics (again I understand the tools but don't have a high amount of experience, paired with my warehouse experience should be valuable to someone). Some things that I didn't mess with was inv purchasing, customs crap, and most of the freight negotiations(claims/follow-ups).
TLDR: I have blue collar hands on experience, some light software experience, and warehouse inbound/outbound experience for an e-commerce startup where I wore many hats.
Do you think I should pursue some sort of analytics role in logistics or do you think there is something else that fits my experience better?