Careers in Operations Management Skills and Talents Required

There are a number of skillsets that are associated with success in operations management roles.

Core Required Skills:

Surprisingly, operations managers spend only 10%-20% of their time dealing with paperwork or machines. Its a misconception that operations only deals with machinery and has nothing to do with people. The rest of the time is spent on people issues, such as, trouble shooting processes and counseling people from the warehouse drivers, to assembly workers, to buyers.

Quality assurance managers must be able to work with employees at all levels in the firm from assembly workers to top executives. Thus, they must be able to have a variety dialogues and understanding of the whole business.

Purchasing managers, buyers, and agents spend half of the income produced by an organization. They are under enormous pressure to skim off the top, bend the rules, and even take kickbacks. Thus they must have complete integrity and ethics.

Production managers and systems analysts must be interested in the flow of work, the relationships between inputs and outputs, and be able to solve problems and be analytical.

Firms need help them competing in a global environment and need people who can solve a range of business issues and concerns and help the organization become leaner, more flexible, and more profitable.