Archived Confused, feeling lost, looking for answers and change...

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How to start this, hmm.

I've been working at Target ON for a little over 2 years now after jumping ship from my salary paid job I had in my field I majored in. I know, I'm crazy, right?
Needless to say, I feel like I've wasted 4 years of my life obtaining a degree only to go through a shit-fest ordeal that has made me second guess pretty much everything I did as a person for my employer and even my schooling. I won't go much further into, but I'll just say that it did put an emotional and mental toll on me. I don't have any intentions of ever returning to it. Enter Target.

Obviously, I'm not being paid anywhere near what I was being paid nor am I even really satisfied with my job. I've grown into the work and surprisingly found that I really enjoy the Logistical side of the entire business. In fact, you could say I have started to obsess over it since I enjoy it so much. I started to realize my enjoyment of some of the work I was doing ON last year in the ending months of the summer, that's when I decided that I wanted to try and go for a ON TL position when it opened. I had to do a lot of work, most of it with changing my demeanor and out look. I don't exactly enjoy most of the people I work with, nor do I really enjoy the company of most people. Which is all still very true, but I knew in order to be a "leader", I needed to at least adapt some of these "lacking traits" of mine.

Anyways, fast forward to this past July. Our store, as well as all the other stores in the district were told to create a TL bench, which they did and I applied for. Ultimately being accepted and eagerly awaiting placement. Since my acceptance on the bench, my direct ETL's, TL's, and even my STL have had me pick up some more responsibilities as long as I was fine with doing it (no additional pay). This consisted of coming up with strategies for truck unload, grid placement, how the floor gets worked, etc. It has been an amazing experience! Day in and day out, I constantly check up on RWT times, our truck sizes, who we have working, crunching numbers, and setting values to individuals and their aisles. Always changing and adjusting the nightly strategy either figuratively or on the rare days when I'm allowed to run the floor, actually putting it to test! I crush the floor with my team! It's exhilarating and addictive and I want to do more of it!

From this point, I became increasingly more interested in how we stock our trucks, why a Push All is generally worse for higher volume stores compared to lower volume stores. The dollar amount our stores are receiving via truck, fuel costs, truck driving costs, how our DC loads our trucks, why they don't palletize the obvious bulk items, but instead remove them and physically load them onto the truck one by one, etc. It's all deeply and incredibly fascinating, all of these processes! I've went to my ETL of Logistics at one point and asked her about the DC and so forth and she offered to set up a tour for not only myself, but the rest of the TL crew. So, I've even seen that process which is mind boggling at some of the redundant tasks they do, just like we do at the store level, including my store.

I've even branched out a little bit from just the ON tasks to creating or trying to create a solution for our battery fill opportunity that our store is pinged on visit after visit. I created a simple Excel sheet that requires manual counts of the batteries at our outposts around the store then cranking out a report telling the TM how to spread them evenly and where. Things like this interest me! I love doing it too, it's sort of like theory crafting and then putting those theories into play and adjusting from those results.



Now, I've gone to my STL, I've gone to my ETL-HR, I've gone to some of my TL's, and I've even reached out to an old ETL at another store now. I don't have connections to this kind of job, I'm not even sure WHAT this job even is. Hell, I'm not even sure if I'd be good at such a job, but I'm deeply fascinated and curious enough to try and figure it out. I've done my own searches, but honestly its such a new and different area that I've never thought about before in my life that I don't even really know where to begin. Sadly, my STL was promoted and we await our new STL and my current ETL of Logistics has been on vacation for nearly a month. I've tried to be patient, but I want to research this now. The only person that's been able to help me is a TL that is reaching out to an employee at corporate, but I've yet to hear anything back. Otherwise, all of the individuals I've talked to about this don't exactly know what kind of job that'd be.

Becoming a TL was great, but I feel like my strengths, talents, and skills would be better in a position that caters to those. Being a TL only would only cover some of them and sometimes not at all (or at least to a degree). I was humored with the idea of becoming a ETL, but honestly it's just that. Comical. I have no desire to become one and I loath having to deal with any guest issues whatsoever. I've done main stream retail for 6 1/2 years, I didn't like it then, I won't like it now. Also why I chose to work ON at Target, heh. I know, this makes me come off as some anti-social pariah or terrible people person, but you all know how terrible retail is. I don't enjoy it. What I do enjoy is what I've explained above.

I'm just absolutely clueless as to how to proceed in such an area of expertise or who I could even talk to...

Any help, any at all would be great!
 
welcome!
this answer came from another thread with a similar question;
yep, no need to answer what's already been answered I figured.

When your STL told you they had connections with "leadership" at a DC I'm going to assume they were referring to Washington state as opposed to Washington DC, as there is a IW in Lacey specifically T-600. If your goal in Target is to move up to a corporate position thru a DC warehousing would get your foot in the door, allowing you to get hands on experience leading people and understanding Target's production system. From there once you've put in 6 months try to look for a Production Controller, or Logistics position. Either of those should allow you more access to the Seniors,HRM and the GM. These people will be able to give you far better advise on moving up to Corporate, than I can.
http://www.thebreakroom.org/showthread.php/3826-Interested-in-working-in-DC!
 
This sounds like an Industrial Engineer or a Business Consultant... If you want this at corporate I would guess you need a Master's Degree in the field and interview at Headquarters.

Anything outside of corporate is implementing already established routines. The GOL (goes by a different title now), was in charge of making sure all established best practices around operations were implemented correctly. However, that is a route an ETL would take and is extremely competitive.
 
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