Career development and the supply chain management professional: an explorative case study from Singapore

This case study explores the career development of some Singaporean supply chain management professionals within the context of Singapore’s people development policy framework and the human resource development (HRD) practices in their own organizations. The study contributes knowledge about the HRD and career development of a specific group of workers thus offering a qualitative dimension to the broad statistical data provided by the Singapore Ministry of Manpower. It also contributes to the body of scholarship relating to HRD in Singapore and to the broader debate regarding skills development of supply chain management practitioners. Participants in this qualitative study were ‘earner-learners’ (Spender 2000) as they were both fulltime supply chain practitioners drawn from a wide range of industrial settings and also part-time students or alumni of a bachelor’s degree in supply chain management. Their accounts of their educational backgrounds, formal learning and workplace learning experiences offer a detailed account of the relationship between HRD and career development for this group of workers. This study has identified specific HRD practices that have most contributed to the professional learning and career development of these practitioners. The paper does not presume to generalize form this study but offers a tentative model for the professional learning of supply chain professionals in Singapore that can be tested in a wider study and in different contexts.