Overview
Junior operations coordinators keep things running. They schedule resources, track deliveries, chase suppliers, and flag problems before they escalate. The role suits people who are naturally organised, comfortable with spreadsheets, and not afraid to pick up the phone when something goes wrong.
This resume belongs to Gemma Whitfield, a recent BSc Operations Management graduate from the University of Huddersfield. She worked part-time as an admin assistant at a logistics company during her degree and completed a placement year at a mid-sized manufacturer. Her resume works because it is packed with process improvements and efficiency metrics that show she already thinks like an operations professional.
What Makes This Resume Work
The placement year is loaded with measurable impact. Gemma spent 12 months at Cranswick plc, a food manufacturer, where she helped coordinate production schedules for a factory processing 18,000 units per day. She identified a scheduling conflict that was causing 3 hours of downtime per week and proposed a fix that the production manager adopted within a month. That is real operational thinking, not just shadowing.
Admin experience is positioned as operations support. Her part-time role at a freight forwarding company involved tracking 40 to 60 shipments per week, chasing customs documentation, and updating clients on delivery timelines. She framed this as supply chain coordination rather than generic admin work, which is exactly how a hiring manager would read it.
Her skills section is tool-specific. Instead of listing "Microsoft Office," Gemma specifies Excel with pivot tables and conditional formatting, SAP (basic navigation from her placement), and Monday.com for project tracking. This tells employers she can contribute on day one without weeks of software training.
The dissertation is directly applicable. Her research analysed supplier lead time variability across 6 UK food manufacturers and found that companies using collaborative forecasting with suppliers reduced late deliveries by 22%. This shows strategic thinking about the exact problems operations teams deal with daily.
Key Takeaways
If you are graduating with an operations management degree, your placement year or industrial experience is the most valuable section of your resume. Quantify everything: units processed, orders tracked, downtime reduced, accuracy rates maintained. Operations managers hire based on evidence that you can spot inefficiencies and act on them, so make sure every bullet point includes a number or a specific outcome.
