If you’re just starting out in your career, the corporate ladder may look insurmountable and overwhelming. You may feel that in demand planning, business forecasting, S&OP and related fields, it Is especially difficult to make it to the executive corner office. I am here to tell you that a promotion is not out of reach and if you want it and work at it, there are opportunities at director level and above.

I am going to be honest with you though, there are challenges, there is bias, and you may be your own worst enemy. But if you are determined to move up or change the course of your career path, there are some things you can do. Drawing on my own career in which I have worked as Director of Demand Planning at various companies, here are nine tips that can help you move from the cubical to the board room. Let’s get going and climb that corporate ladder!

1. Develop Your Own Career Map

To achieve your full potential, you need to own your career path. You cannot wait or assume your boss will just reward you for your hard work. Understand what it is you really want to do professionally. Ask yourself what your professional identity is and what it needs to be to get where you want to be. Figure out your strengths, values, and preferences and determine how these qualities will fit into the identity you aspire to become. Then create a roadmap that will get you where you want to be.

2. Be Willing To Let Go

There is a common career staller for demand planners who are technically proficient and have a lot of business forecasting expertise. You see, it may be all that success and ability that is stopping you from advancing. Many organizations become dependent on you as an individual contributor and fear that they may lose those insights if they put you in a management role. Leadership inherently requires letting go of control and enabling others to do the work. You have been effective, so the need to make changes in order to break through to leadership may be just what you need. While I do not advocate being less successful as an individual contributor, early on in your career you need to try to balance your time with strategic planning, coaching others, developing people and other work – and all that necessitates stepping back.

3. Be willing to Accept Risk

You are going to make mistakes. There is a great sports axiom – you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Making mistakes is one of the best learning opportunities there is, so don’t be afraid to make one. By trial and error, you’ll learn. From experience, you’ll grow. From failure, you’ll gain wisdom. From success, you’ll gain confidence. That’s the beauty of taking risks. Basically what I am saying is take the shot and don’t worry if it misses.

4. Come with Solutions

I hate the saying “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions”. That’s how small-minded managers think. That said, regardless of how junior you may be or what department you are in, you can have ideas that positively affect the company. Bring solutions to the table or anything that can improve things in your area. Show people that you think strategically and look beyond your day-to-day activities. Do not be content with just doing things the way they have always been done and do not shy away from opportunities to show you add value at a higher level.

5. Play Well With Others

You never know who may end up being your boss or helping your career so try not to burn bridges early in your career. With what we do we have the unique advantage of touching so many other departments and collaborating with so many people. Use this and remember there may be a lot of value in doing things that at the moment do not benefit you. These relationships and positive behaviors may not have immediate benefits but in the long run, they may open up doors or move you up the ladder.

6. Promote Yourself

While this may not be entirely possible you can be your own greatest cheerleader. It is not always intentional but your boss and others may not know how great you are or the success you just had. Be comfortable with bragging about yourself from time to time. Not to the point that it is all about you, but a little positive press on a big accomplishment may be just the thing you need to get noticed. When others are aware of your value, they can help you get the recognition you deserve or help you get promoted.

7. Be an Influencer

The surprising thing is that you don’t need to be a director to have influence. I was an analyst running an executive S&OP process. I have seen others without a title be the one in a room that others are listening to. Your character and confidence build the trust and respect needed so people listen to your comments and value them. When you lead, others want to follow you. As you become to be known for getting things done, building alliances, and gaining buy-in for your ideas, you begin to be the kind of person people rely on. Then it only makes sense to promote you to a position that uses these qualities.

8. Continuous Learning

Truly good leaders are constantly learning. They’re the first to tell you that they don’t know everything. As a result, they are always challenging themselves and keeping on top of trends in the field. To help you, find ways to attend IBF conferences, read up on developments in the field and best techniques and methodologies, watch videos, and become active in the wider demand planning community. Consider getting IBF certified and challenge yourself to write for an industry publication [Ed: like the Journal of Business Forecasting] or speak at a conference or webinar. All these things help position you as a thought leader in the field. As a result, you’ll be prepared when higher-level positions open up because your skills and knowledge will have expanded.

9. Orchestrate Your Own Promotion

If all else fails and you find yourself in a position where no next level is in sight, it may be time to create your own. I have done this many times myself and have seen it successfully done by others. Many companies do not have a director of analytics or demand planning for you to move into. Help the organization understand the benefits of the role you want and show them that no other existing department can do it the way you can. Build a business case around what you can do for the company and include the new role, scope, responsibilities, and value. If you are genuinely hungry for a career advancement, you’ll make the promotion yourself.

Find your next role on IBF’s Jobs Page which features a range of demand planning, forecasting, supply chain and related vacancies.

An excellent way to secure your next promotion is to get IBF certified. This globally recognized demand planning certificate puts you in an elite group of forecasters and demand planners with many CPF professionals reporting that it helped land them their next promotion or pay raise. Click here for more information.

It all started at AIWA Consumer Electronics in the early 1990s. Here I was, a fresh MBA in my first Associate Product Manager role for personal audio products. Every year, new versions would replace the prior year’s products. End of year was filled with clearance specials of products just sitting in our warehouse that had failed to sell. The more that accumulated in warehouses, the further away we were from our profit targets.

One of my product marketing responsibilities was the demand plan. The inherited budget and forecast was prior year sales + 10% expected growth rate on all designs. My counterparts covering other categories used the same approach, and worked at selling the current inventory. It was a basic approach, to put it kindly. This is a story of how that paradigm changed completely.

Overall forecast error at the time was around 20% for the 5-month order-to-warehouse cycle. Not bad by marketing team reasoning but nowhere near good enough by management’s standards, or ours come to think of it. Collaboration meetings would open with our distribution manager, Joe Sparta, saying “You guys are selling plenty of what we don’t have and not enough of we do have”.

The lack of insight into what our customers wanted and how to service that need was painfully obvious. The inefficiency in supply chain was shocking.

In graduate school, I had the pleasure of taking Chaman Jain’s graduate forecasting class where I learned the power of measuring MAPE. I applied this method to my new role and running the numbers by SKU at AIWA, we had 105% MAPE. No wonder we needed clearance specials, and Joe was having a difficult time with customer service!

Something needed changing, and fast.

Luckily, Chaman Jain was open to helping out an old student. He has an immense wealth of knowledge and experience, and I was fortunate enough to be taken under his wing. Chaman Jain founded IBF, is the author of the Fundamentals of Demand Planning book and is Editor of the IBF’s Journal of Business Forecasting. I couldn’t have hoped for a better mentor.

Chaman had been where I was at that time, and understood the challenges I faced. What’s more, he knew intimately all the mistakes we were making. What I was trying to do was desperately make sense of vast amounts of data that seemed more like a quagmire than a clear insight into customer demand.

We discussed the challenges of relating older products to the newer versions. Considering the seasonality of my category (Christmas, Dads & Grads bumps), he recommended starting with multiplicative decomposition. I took shipment seasonality of the category rather than prior products because of the changes in features at price point. The next step was treating distribution penetration as a trend level. The distribution multiplier became the retailer share of consumer sales published by the trade magazine TWICE (This Week in Consumer Electronics). This dropped my MAPE to the sixties. We weren’t where we wanted to be, but changes had been implemented and definite progress was made. Joe was happier, and we had put the company on track to greater profitability.

The next step to improve accuracy was to use NPD INTELECT POS data. Clark Johnson, the sales VP who provided our data, provided in-depth guidance on data limitations. Using consumer purchases, I fine-tuned these simple models as the data became available (there was a 2-month delay).

My first step in changing category seasonality from shipments to consumption dramatically improved the forecast accuracy after initial pipe fills. This meant while we still had a good call for the highest seasonal period of Christmas, we had a weaker call for Dads and Grads when POG (Plan-O-Grams) were being reset. Overall, our MAPE for the 5 month order period improved to under 40%. Joe was getting happier.

Sales and retailers were not as happy, however. The more efficient our supply chain, the fewer opportunities there are for discount clearances. My manager and VP were very happy that profits were up for my category. This resulted in a promotion to Product Manager of Personal Stereo, as well as assuming additional responsibilities forecasting the other 4 categories.

My move to a forecasting career was solidified by one product. Our team designed an innovative new product – the first 100 watt, simple to operate, shelf top stereo system. Before this, all US shelf top stereos were between 10 and 30 watts of power. The product and sales teams believed that focusing on lower watt stereos were holding back our US market share and that the new stereo would be a game changer.

Launching the new product was quite a gamble to say the least.

The initial forecast was to move AIWA from a 12% share to a 18% share of the shelf top category. The first hint of success was 100% distribution with all major retailers placing the product in their POGs (Plan-O-Grams). We sold out of the initial container loads as soon as they arrived and increased our forecasts.

The gamble had paid off big time.

Management’s key question was how big could this get? We did not know if retailers were loading inventory because of expected shortages (common at that time – see MAPE comments above). But when the consumption data came in, we knew we had a hot seller. Using two months of fully distributed consumption sales divided by the category seasonality of those two months, we had an estimate of between a 55 and 65% share of our projected category sales (compared to our budgeted goal of 18%). This was a huge success for the company.

We only doubled our forecast because management did not completely buy into the seasonality based forecast. When the third month of consumption confirmed the same 55 to 65% share, our senior management team had the Malaysia factory to go to triple shifts. We manufactured for the conservative 55% share number and ended up selling out of almost all the containers coming into the US, exceeding the quantity. AIWA grew the category and become the dominant category leader.

Forecasting’s role in driving the company from $100 million to $300 million sales changed my career. To say it was an exciting time is an understatement.

I saw the power of forecasting and I was hooked.

Soon after, Roger Brown recruited me to Duracell. He exposed me to the consumption paradigm with rich data sources to drive the forecast. As part of Roger’s team, we regularly attended IBF forecasting conferences. I now had the opportunity to work with, and learn from, some of the best in our profession.

It all started with a conversation with Chaman Jain and joining IBF. Forecasting through demand planning and applying predictive analytics is a vocation that still inspires, challenges and motivates me today. And, why wouldn’t it? When done properly, demand planning sales to retailers through understanding the consumer allows you to predict the future. It enables even established companies to reach unimaginable levels of profitability.