Skill Development Need of an Hour for Supply Chain Professionals

This paper aims to examine important skill sets required for supply chain professionals. Initially supply chain managers did not realized the relevance of skills development particularly, soft skills in their profession. However, now this realization is becoming significant. Supply chain managers of today understand that skill development is extremely essential tool for successful management of supply chains. The shift towards skill development as a supply chain success factor motivated the researcher to investigate about the major skills required for effective management of supply chains. Initial investigation showed a drift towards soft skills development compared to hard skills, this lead us to focus on soft skills for this paper. A literature review was conducted comprising of research papers, books and reports. The analysis revealed that a number of soft skills are necessary for SCM managers however; most of these skills were either missing or under investigated generating a need for in-depth investigation of the causes for missing of these skills. Researcher feels that lack of these skills could be at 3 levels: organization level, policy level and individual level. Therefore planning for incorporation of these soft skills in SCM management needs cooperation from all the 3 layers. During the literature review process, it emerged that soft skills did not have a formal categorization making them difficult to contemplate; therefore this paper attempts to categorize soft skills into six broad categories and then analyse the relevance of each on supply chain management. The analysis revealed that emotional intelligence is one of the dominant skills affecting and connecting other skills. Therefore the paper suggests measures for improving emotional intelligence across the supply chain.