Bill: Improving my career and helping others make better business decisions

The MicroMasters program is improving my career, helping me lead others and helping me to make better decisions on the job. Plus, it’s the best deal in the world! $150 bucks a class? It’s just wonderful.

As a Director of Supply Chain Management, I spend my days at a leading manufacturing company. In addition to this role as a supply chain practitioner, I also approach supply chain from an academic angle, teaching courses at APICS and DePaul University in their non-degree programs. Another academic aspect of my current professional life is that I’m an MBA student at Kellogg and currently enrolled in their executive MBA program. I spend time nurturing my own career and helping advance the careers of young professionals both in the real-word and classroom environment.

Prior to enrolling in the Supply Chain Management MicroMasters, I had taken another MITx class on edX called The Analytics Edge from Professor Bertsimas – and I loved it. It was fantastic. I was very much a beginner with analytics and the R language, and it just amazed me how much I could learn. As soon as I saw that there would be a supply chain course from MITx, I knew I wanted to take it.

The primary reason that I signed up for the MicroMasters in Supply Chain Management was because I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the knowledge I already have as a supply chain practitioner. This program is a great opportunity to really dig into the more quantitative aspects of supply chain management, an area I felt that I needed to learn more about to truly round out my approach to practicing my profession and to help instruct new supply chain professionals during the early stages in their careers.

Since Supply Chain Management is a relatively new discipline, a lot of the leaders in the practice don’t have formal training and perhaps don’t understand all of the elements involved in their job from an academic perspective. Over the years, the discipline has become much more quantitative and much more analytics focused. It’s still very much about relationships at the leadership level, but nowadays there’s a lot of topics that I feel I need to catch up on. So far, I’ve encountered many of these topics in the MicroMasters content and the knowledge I’m gaining is informing my day-to-day professional and academic commitments.

For example, the MITx MicroMasters courses provide a deep dive into the industry, including content on the applied math and analytics skills necessary to succeed and advance in today’s workplace. These skills were not given as much of a focus when I started out on this career path, so MicroMasters is a great opportunity for leaders and practitioners to catch themselves up and also for those beginning in the profession to gain a competitive edge.

Start the MITx Supply Chain Management MicroMasters program. The first course, Supply Chain Analytics, begins November 2 and is open for enrollment today!