How To Become A Business Planning Manager: What It Is and Career Path

What is a business planning manager and how to become one

Updated January 8, 2025

3 min read

Quoted expert

Andrew Spicer

Business planning managers design processes that make business planning a more manageable endeavor. They create strategies for viable business operations and supervise teams to help work on achieving their goals.

Business planning managers provide executives with suggestions on how to improve business activities based on performance analysis and forecasts. It is their job to prioritize business initiatives, create best practices for employees and departments to follow, and work towards meeting company objectives.

They are there to assist management in allocating resources, drawing up budgets, accounting for revenue, and many more tasks. This is a complex and varied position, and it has the potential to be very rewarding for a driven analytical thinker with great organizational and leadership skills.

What general advice would you give to a business planning manager?

Andrew Spicer

Associate Professor, Website

Resiliency is a particularly important skill for international business and career progression. Resiliency – the ability to recover quickly in the face of obstacles and failures – has always been a critical part of successful international assignments. The only constant of working abroad is that there will be miscommunication and mistakes. Successful international business careers depend on the ability to learn from these inevitable setbacks to improve over time. The constant change in the global business environment also leads to the demand for resiliency among international business specialists. An important role for those with a global mindset is to help companies adapt to the massive disruption to the global business environment for international trade and investment presently taking place across the world.

ScoreBusiness Planning ManagerUS Average

Salary

8.0

Avg. Salary $115,251

Avg. Salary $59,228

Stability level

7.5

Growth rate 10%

Growth rate 0.3%

Diversity

3.1

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 0.23%

Asian 8.15%

Black or African American 3.04%

Hispanic or Latino 8.67%

Unknown 5.32%

White 74.58%

Gender

female 34.85%

male 65.15%

Age - 38

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 3.00%

Asian 7.00%

Black or African American 14.00%

Hispanic or Latino 19.00%

White 57.00%

Gender

female 47.00%

male 53.00%

Age - 38

Stress level

7.5

Stress level is high

7.1 - high

Complexity level

9.0

Complexity level is advanced

7 - challenging

Work life balance

3.5

Work life balance is poor

6.4 - fair

Key steps to become a business planning manager

Explore business planning manager education requirements

Most common business planning manager degrees

Bachelor's

70.3 %

Master's

22.4 %

Associate

5.3 %

Start to develop specific business planning manager skills

Skills	Percentages
Business Planning	18.86%
Competitive Analysis	7.09%
Direct Reports	6.02%
Project Management	5.79%
Business Objectives	5.62%

Complete relevant business planning manager training and internships

Accountants spend an average of 1-3 months on post-employment, on-the-job training. New business planning managers learn the skills and techniques required for their job and employer during this time. The chart below shows how long it takes to gain competency as a business planning manager based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and data from real business planning manager resumes.

Research business planning manager duties and responsibilities

Lead central team summarizing and prioritizing all DOD opportunities, enabling more efficient and effective resource allocation across several program departments.
Create and implement new product BOM's.
Verify WIP movement transactions are complete and with the latest BOM changes.
Provide management with managerial reporting, variances explanations, and KPIs for decision making.

Prepare your business planning manager resume

When your background is strong enough, you can start writing your business planning manager resume.

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