The long way here
From helping in my father's shop in Bahawalpur, through a pharmacy counter, door-to-door sales and restaurant shifts, to an MSc in London that I paid for myself. There's a ship stuck in the Suez in it too.
Read my story
Royal Holloway, University of London, 2026. My dissertation, marked 85, followed two UK logistics firms through automation and found that it acted on tasks, not posts. I'm now looking for my first role in supply chain, logistics, procurement or operations.
DP World London Gateway, September 2026
Independent Business Research Project (MN5028): 11,999 words, marked 85. Four senior informants across three organisations, interviewed at executive, operational and national policy level.
The question was how UK logistics and facilities management firms are adapting workforce strategy to automation, and what makes their responses diverge. Most research on this is macro-economic: it estimates which occupations are exposed to computerisation. That describes what technology can do to the demand for work. It says much less about what firms choose to do with it. So I went to the firms.
“Of excellent quality, and demonstrating well-designed and executed research.”
A whole fuel-reconciliation procedure was automated away and the role stayed. The traffic office did not contract; the capacity released went to time with drivers.
At one firm it feeds a standing continuous-improvement process, rated at least as important as the technology itself. Without a mechanism to absorb it, a refocus is only a form of words.
The opposite of the casualisation automation is expected to bring. One uses no agency drivers at all, by internal decision.
Where automation leaves spare capacity, one firm permits reduced hours on unchanged salary, because staff who expect displacement will not help automate their own work.
A task can be fully automatable and remain human because an identifiable person must answer for it. In regulated work, legislation sets the pace, not technology.
904 staff hours of transition training, worth £35,448, sit under environmental performance rather than skills. National levy data captures spend and completions, never progression or retention.
“You can’t ask people to help automate their own work if they think they’re automating themselves out of a job. We told our team up front that automation at Welch wasn’t about cutting posts, and that’s what got the people who actually know the work to help change it. Muhammad’s study is one of the few I’ve seen that looks at what firms really do, not what the models say they’ll do.”
The MSc gave me the framework. What I wanted alongside it was the operational reality, so I spent the year getting onto sites, into conferences, and in front of the people who run the work.
From helping in my father's shop in Bahawalpur, through a pharmacy counter, door-to-door sales and restaurant shifts, to an MSc in London that I paid for myself. There's a ship stuck in the Suez in it too.
Read my storySecuring access to four senior informants, negotiating consent, holding a member-checking process together and producing five separately tailored editions of the findings from one controlled source taught me more about this industry than any reading list. The work I'm after is the same shape: get the detail right, hold it together through revisions, and put it in front of people in the form they need it.
If you're hiring, or you want the full dissertation, write to me and I'll reply the same day.