Professionalising Trade: How the industry has changed and what entrants can expect

What does beginning a career in international trade look like? As students receive their GCSE results and consider their next steps, the Daily Update spoke to Mark Lamming, trade and customs specialist at the Chartered Institute of Export & International Trade, to understand the experience of starting out in the industry and how that has changed – quite dramatically – in response to Brexit.

Brexit Boom

Lamming says he can’t overstate the ‘day and night’ divide between customs brokerage work before and after Brexit, when the end of the UK’s participation in the single market necessitated a raft of new documentation for every shipment.

“There wasn't much going on before. It was very ad hoc because trade was mostly through Europe, so there were no customs requirements.

“After Brexit, all of a sudden we had a requirement for tens of thousands of customs entries. At our firm, that meant hundreds and hundreds of new brokers were needed.”

Professionalisation

This transformed the experience of doing a customs brokerage job. Prior to Brexit, Lamming described a “buddy system” in which trainees would learn the ropes from more experienced hands.

There would always be someone there to sign off your declaration, someone to direct your questions to, but the arrangement was informal, with learning dependent on the quality of the environment and superiors you were signed.

However, with a new wave of requirements, alongside substantial systems updates, there was a need to formally train a new cohort of brokers and forwarders:

“We needed to get a lot of people up to a professional standard when no professional standards existed at the time.”

In practice, this meant letting new staff train on the Global Customs Academy courses, newly created in anticipation of the new compliance demands placed on companies post-Brexit.

Reflecting on the industry today, Lamming suggests that most well-known firms would have their entry-level brokers trained to at least Level 2 or Level 3 before they worked on day-to-day customs operations.

Which is better?

The “massive levels of reassurance” that come with being able to check in with colleagues for each entry is definitely a pro.

However, with big changes occurring simultaneously, there’s been a breakdown in this model, as managers are now learning along with newbies. Lamming says:

“We’ve had brand new systems for everything from licensing to declarations, to transit and everything in between.

“Managers may never have used CDS, they may only ever use CHIEF, and because they’re no longer putting declarations together, they’re less able to help.”

Less insight from more experienced hands makes structured training that digs into the “academic theory” behind the practice more important than ever. However, Lamming cautions against unleashing trainees unsupported too soon.

“There's an assumption when you get to the end of the course, that you're good to go, and that’s just not the reality in freight forwarding.

“It would only take half a day to teach someone to put together a basic free circulation entry, but once sat in a brokerage department, that’s not what every shipment will look like, day in, day out.”

Rewarding role

Yet this variety is part of what draws many to customs and freight forwarding roles, as well as the challenging, fast-paced environment.

“You need to be able to handle multiple different threads of work simultaneously, because you might have several different customs declaration on one truck, and when you have different problems with different declarations – that truck's going to get blocked until each one is resolved,” Lamming says.

With these high stakes situation comes the opportunity to hone key business skills at a relatively early point in your career, such as negotiation and stakeholder management.

“You might be working on behalf of an importer, but the exporter may not want to give important information that gets that ruck moving again.

“You need to act as a bit of a negotiator and get them to work together to create the documentation you need.”

With the increase in positions available since 2021 and early-career opportunities to upskill and progress, it’s definitely a route Lamming would recommend, especially for those not considering university.

While he emphasises the usefulness of GCSE maths and English in an industry that requires good numeracy skills and the ability to interpret rules and regulations, Lamming says that a degree isn’t a prerequisite. Comparing forwarding to accountancy, he adds:

“You can go down the degree route, or you could go to a specialist school and just take the professional qualification – one person might have more theoretical knowledge but, for all intents and purposes, they’re qualified to the same level.”

The Chartered Institute's apprenticeship delivery arm, IOEx, offers a range of qualifications for those beginning their career in trade, including a Level 3 International Freight Forwarding Specialist Apprenticeship.