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DHL

3.4
  • > 100,000 employees

Joshua Spencer

My job is within the national compliance team at the Transport HUB. The main responsibility of the compliance team is to protect the legal and ethical integrity of DHL.

What's your job about?

My job is within the national compliance team at the Transport HUB. The main responsibility of the compliance team is to protect the legal and ethical integrity of DHL. To do this our team interprets National Heavy Vehicle and WH&S legislation and applies this to create practices, policies and programs that aim to safeguard DHL from any possible legal dispute and create a safer workplace. Specific areas that demand attention are that of managing fatigue, driving behaviours, mass limits, load restraint and the increasingly prevalent chain of responsibility framework. My responsibility within this team requires me to regularly communicate with our interstate transport managers and sub-contractors to ensure they provide me with various completed driver/vehicle checklists, run sheets, work diaries, GPS/speed reports and maintenance records. I will then analyse this information before entering it into an excel dashboard which I was able to create and design myself. This dashboard acts to compile and display a wide range of statistics and performance metrics per fleet per state and summarises this data to easily be presented by my manager at the end of each month to senior management. It’s worth noting I had close to no Microsoft excel experience before joining DHL yet here I am within 6 months designing my own reporting tools, so it goes to show how quickly you can learn from tasks you are doing and that there is a culture to be proactive and innovative with your own ideas.

What's your background?

I have grown up and spent my entire life living at Umina Beach, a coastal town on the Central Coast which I can’t bring myself to make a move city bound at any stage yet. I studied a Bachelor of Commerce at Macquarie University following high school and got my first real job as a Fire-fighter which I did part-time and still do to this day. It can sure get a little hectic juggling full time work with my fire-fighting commitments but it’s an exciting and rewarding second job to have. After getting my Bachelor’s degree in 2014, I landed a graduate role with Mainfreight, another supply chain company where I worked for 2 years before leaving to pursue a passion to travel. I spent nearly 8 months abroad travelling throughout Europe having the time of my life but eventually made the return home in early 2017. It was at this stage where I began my search for a new career. I began my search with an open mind in terms of what business sector or role I wanted but stumbled across DHL, which I knew was a huge global business and with my already fondness with the industry decided it would be a good fit for myself. I went for and got the position as an operations graduate in March 2017 so am currently late into my first rotation (Transport) which I have thoroughly enjoyed and looking forward to what my next rotation brings.

Could someone with a different background do your job?

Absolutely. Although I did a business degree, I never had the opportunity to learn about the supply chain and logistics sector so everything was completely new to me besides my own common knowledge. There are a significant number of employees here who have completely irrelevant backgrounds / education and working experiences which have given supply chain and logistics a go and have never looked out of place. Good characteristics/skills to have in my job would definitely be having a good attention to detail, effective communication and I would advise to brush up on your Microsoft excel skills because you really can do wonders with it and impress your managers.

What's the coolest thing about your job?

What I love most about my job is the fact that my manager has allowed me to go into my role with an open mind in terms of voicing my opinions on current projects and systems in place and really advocating to me to make any changes I see as being improvements. With this I have been able to improve some of our reporting metrics and create a much more user friendly interface by vastly reducing the time needed to be spent on compiling data and the way it is represented. The feedback has been very positive and allows me to look forward to work.

What are the limitations of your job?

The biggest limitation to my job is trying to communicate effectively with various parties to get the information I need. Replies are very inconsistent and require you to do a lot of chasing up and policing, which as a fairly new team member can prove to be difficult at times.

Pieces of advice for yourself when you were a student...

Travel. If I had my time over I would have done a lot more travelling because it is the perfect time to do it with all the time off you get. I can’t even remember what I did with all that time off and now when I think back it’s something I definitely regret not doing. Like any university student I didn’t really have the money for it or at least I believe I did but it will surprise you how much you can do overseas with minimal money. Make it work.