Senior Export Freight Planner
At a freight forwarder, you lead the senior layer of export freight planning — complex routing decisions, major-customer pursuit work, mentoring junior planners, and the senior operational judgment behind export-freight planning.
What it's like to be a Senior Export Freight Planner
Days tend to mix complex planning work, major-customer engagement, and team mentoring — building routing plans for complex export shipments, supporting major-customer RFPs with routing and pricing analysis, mentoring junior planners on tough scenarios, supporting operational leadership on planning strategy. Routing-decision quality, major-customer wins, and team capability shape the visible measures.
The harder part is often the multi-customer trade-off work — senior planners balance major-customer commitments against capacity constraints, and the judgment required at the senior level is real. Variance across employers is sharp: large global forwarders run with senior planning specialists; smaller forwarders concentrate the senior work on a smaller team.
This role tends to fit folks who carry deep trade-lane fluency, comfort with the routing puzzle at scale, and the mentoring instincts that senior planning work involves. CSCMP, FIATA diploma, and senior trade-industry experience anchor advancement. The trade-off is the seasonal-peak pressure when capacity tightens and the cumulative cognitive load of carrying many parallel planning scenarios.
Where this role sits in the broader career landscape — and where it can take you.
Roles like this one sit within a broader occupational category. The numbers below reflect that full landscape — helpful for context, but your specific experience will depend on level, specialty, and where you work.
How this category is changing
Skills & Requirements
Navigate your career with clarity
Truest gives you tools to understand your strengths, explore roles that fit, and plan your next move.
Explore Truest career toolsTruest editorial: Fit check, role profile, things that vary, advancement analysis, lateral moves, interview questions.