How to become a maintenance planner

Most maintenance planners come off the tools.

Of 14 job advertisements we looked at, not one required a degree. What employers actually asked for was around 5 years of hands-on maintenance experience, competence in a CMMS, and the discipline to prepare work properly. Expect somewhere between $75,000 and $95,000.

This article covers what the job really involves, what employers ask for, the skills that matter most, what a planner's week looks like, and how to get there from the tools.

One thing before we start. I have never been a maintenance planner. I came up through engineering, team leader and management roles, and I have never worked on the tools. What I have done is appoint planners, manage them, watch good ones transform a maintenance team, and spend years training them.

So take what follows as the view from that side of the desk.

What does a maintenance planner actually do?

A planner prepares work so that technicians can execute it without waiting, searching or improvising.

That sounds simple.

It isn't, and it takes a planner into 3 quite different places.

In the plant. Diagnosing problems, scoping jobs, checking access to equipment, talking to supervisors and technicians. When a planner walks the plant scoping a job, it should be nearly impossible to tell them apart from an operator or a supervisor. If your planner never gets dirty, something has gone wrong.

In the office. Building work orders and work packs. Hunting down technical information, drawings and documentation, which in most organisations takes far longer than anyone budgets for.

In the warehouse. Checking that parts have arrived, that they are the right parts, that they are in good condition, and that everything has been staged and kitted before the job is scheduled.

A planner who only does the office part is not planning.

They are doing data entry.

What employers actually ask for

Most articles on this topic tell you what a planner should have.

Very few look at what employers are actually advertising for.

So we read 14 live job advertisements in August 2026, across petrochemicals, mining, power generation, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, a wastewater utility and general manufacturing. Employers included Shell, Chevron, PepsiCo, Diageo, Novo Nordisk and Thiess.

Here is what those 14 ads asked for.

A few things worth pulling out of that.

No degree. Not one of the 14 required one. This is backed up by employer-reported data elsewhere showing that roughly 3 quarters of people working as maintenance planners at 4 to 7 years of experience hold no bachelor's degree.

SAP dominates. Of the 10 ads naming a specific system, 9 named SAP. Maximo appeared 3 times, always alongside SAP. If you want to make yourself employable as a planner, learning to drive SAP properly will do more for you than most courses.

Certifications are nice to have. Where a certification appeared it was always "preferred", never required. And the certification named was usually CMRP, which is a general maintenance and reliability credential rather than a planning one.

Now the finding that matters most.

Only 4 of the 14 ads distinguished planning experience from maintenance experience. Chevron was the clearest, asking for 5 years including 2 years specifically in planning and scheduling. The other 10 treated "5 years in maintenance" as though it were the same thing as knowing how to plan.

It isn't, and that gap is a large part of why so many planners struggle once they are in the chair.

One note if you work outside North America or Europe. Degree requirements vary by region. In the Middle East, across much of Asia, and in parts of Africa, job ads specify degrees considerably more often. Part of the reason is that technical education is structured differently in those regions, and engineering degrees are far more common among people working in the trades. So the honest answer to "do I need a degree" depends on where you are working.

The skills that actually matter

There are 6 areas worth thinking about: technical skills, planning skills, organisational skills, people skills, computer skills, and attitude.

That's a lot to carry. So here are the 2 that matter most.

Good technical knowledge and experience. That is the base requirement, and there is no way around it.

Being organised, disciplined and able to work without much supervision. A planner who needs chasing will not last.

Everything else can be taught.

Those 2 are much harder to install in someone who doesn't have them.

Technical skills

You need to understand how the equipment works and how it fails.

You also need to be able to troubleshoot and diagnose, because diagnosing the problem correctly is where good planning starts.

And you need to have actually done the work you are planning.

You don't want to be a desktop planner who knows how things work in theory. That doesn't survive contact with a real plant.

Over time you will also want a working understanding of failure modes, preventive maintenance, RCM, root cause analysis and precision maintenance. But that knowledge is relatively easy to teach to someone with the right trade background and the right attitude. Don't let a gap there stop you applying.

Planning skills

Take a complex job, say a full compressor overhaul, and break it into a series of smaller logical steps. Sequence them properly. Work out what has to happen first, and what can and cannot happen at the same time.

Then add the technical detail to every step. What must be done, how, and to what standard. Flag the hazards that need controlling. Document all of it in the work pack.

That takes a level of discipline and attention to detail that not everyone has.

Organisational skills

You will be maintaining equipment data and records, building work packs you can reuse, and helping manage the backlog.

If your records are scattered, you will drown.

You also need to manage your own workload against agreed priorities, while staying flexible when those priorities change. Which they will, constantly, because that is what a producing plant is like.

People skills

You don't have to be a charismatic leader.

But a very introverted technical specialist who won't go and talk to anyone will struggle badly.

You will be building rapport with technicians, operators, supervisors and engineers. Asking questions. Taking feedback on your job plans without getting defensive about them.

You want to be someone who sees feedback as a gift. The planners who improve fastest are the ones who go and ask how the job actually went.

Computer skills

Most planners come off the tools, so they often have less experience working in an office environment. And some CMMS systems are, to put it kindly, hard to work with.

The goal is to become one of the most capable CMMS users in your organisation.

You won't start there. You do need to want to get there.

Attitude, and one thing I look for above all

Positive, can-do problem solving. Calm under pressure.

A structured thinker who works through a process rather than shooting from the hip.

And then there is the one that separates good planners from very good ones.

Curiosity.

The best planners I have worked with go and check things. They double check things. They are conscientious about not leaving anything loose or open, so their technicians don't get surprises out in the field.

If you want a single question to test yourself against: when you don't know something, do you go and look, or do you assume?

A day in the life of a maintenance planner

Here's roughly how a planner's week should be structured. Adjust it to your site, but keep the proportions.

Mornings. Start with the daily meeting to review and prioritise new work requests, because once approved those requests come to you. Then get out to the job sites. Then back to the office to build job plans and order parts.

Afternoons. Several days a week, go to the warehouse and check the parts that have arrived, and verify staging and kitting for next week's frozen schedule. More job planning. And a couple of times a week, sit down informally with the supervisor to talk through job plans and what work should be grouped.

That last one matters more than it looks.

Unless it's in the schedule, neither of you will make time for it.

Before you go home, write tomorrow's list. Which job sites you are visiting, and specifically what you are looking for at each one. A site visit with a checklist is worth 3 without one.

One warning. That 25% out of the office is a starting point, and in most plants it should be higher. If you find yourself at your desk all week, your job plans will show it.

So how do you become a maintenance planner?

The most common route is the simplest one.

Technician, then planner, then supervisor.

I like to see organisations treat the planner role as the step between working on the tools and supervising a crew. It works in both directions. A supervisor who has spent a few years planning understands what makes a crew efficient and what the planner needs from them. And it gives your technicians a visible, sensible next step in their career.

So if you are on the tools now, you are in exactly the right place to start.

What to do from here:

1. Get good at the work first. You need to have done the jobs you'll be planning. There is no shortcut past this.
2. Learn your CMMS properly. Not just closing work orders. Learn how it holds equipment data, how work packs are built, how history is recorded. This is the single most visible skill gap in most planner candidates.
3. Start noticing what makes jobs go wrong. The missing part, the wrong sequence, the permit that wasn't ready. That's the raw material of planning.
4. Ask to be involved in job preparation before you have the title. Most planners are glad of the help, and it's the fastest way to find out whether you actually like the work.
5. Get some structured training. Which brings us to certifications.

Do you need a certification?

Here's where the market gets strange.

Read that table again.

The credential that costs $300 and has no entry requirements is the one that actually shows up in job ads. The planning-specific credentials that cost $7,000 to $8,500 appeared in none of them.

That doesn't make the expensive ones worthless. The KU PSC covers real ground across 4 courses, and Marshall's program is coached over 12 weeks rather than being an exam you sit. But if you are spending your own money and your goal is to get hired, the price-to-recognition ratio is worth thinking about hard.

One correction while we're here. You may come across a claim that certification from the Institute of Industrial Engineers is "often required" to become a maintenance planner. It isn't. That organisation changed its name in 2016, it doesn't offer a maintenance planner certification, and not one of the 14 ads we read mentioned it. It appears in a widely-read industry glossary and has spread from there. Ignore it.

What does a maintenance planner earn?

Somewhere between $75,000 and $95,000 in the US, with $85,000 to $90,000 the most defensible middle.

The salary sources disagree badly, which is why that range is so wide.

That's a 28% spread for the same job title. And it gets wider: one aggregator publishes about $50,000, roughly $40,000 below the posting-derived sources. Its own related-jobs list is full of production planners and supply planners, which suggests it is matching the wrong roles entirely.

Why the others disagree comes down to method. Glassdoor's figure is total pay including bonuses, and its base range actually lands close to ZipRecruiter's number. Indeed and ZipRecruiter scrape job postings, which skew high because employers advertise the top of the band. PayScale and Glassdoor rely on people volunteering their own numbers.

For context outside the US: about £40,000 in the UK, A$98,000 in Australia, and C$90,000 in Canada. Senior planners in Australian mining and Canadian oil sands go a great deal higher, well past A$170,000 and C$130,000 respectively.

Oil and gas, mining and chemicals pay a real premium, roughly 25% over general manufacturing, confirmed across 2 independent sources.

The pay problem nobody mentions

Now the thing none of those tables will tell you.

Moving from technician to planner is often a pay cut.

Think about what actually happens. As a technician you're on shift, and you have overtime. As a planner you're paid for a 40-hour week and the overtime disappears. So a higher base salary can still mean less money in your pocket at the end of the month.

I've seen this stop good technicians from taking the job more times than I can count. And most of them never say it out loud, because it sounds like they're not ambitious.

So before you take a planner role, work out your actual take-home, not your base. Compare like with like. If the number goes backwards, that is a legitimate thing to raise, and a well-run organisation will have already thought about it.

If yours hasn't, the next section is worth forwarding to your manager.

If you're the one appointing a planner

Most of the above is for the person who wants the job. This part is for whoever is filling it.

Hire for trade experience and hire for attitude. Technical knowledge and computer skills can be taught. The right mindset is much harder to install in someone who doesn't already have it.

Don't take someone from your admin pool and make them a planner. And don't make an engineer your planner either. You want someone with practical hands-on experience in the trade they'll be planning for. I believe that strongly.

Don't take your youngest technician either. They may have the best computer skills in the crew, but they'll struggle to estimate job durations and they'll be seeing half the jobs for the first time.

Do take your scheduler from admin. This is the exception that surprises people. The scheduler role isn't technical by nature. It needs someone organised, computer-literate and comfortable with a reasonable admin load. Some of the best schedulers I've worked with were conscientious admin staff who wanted a bigger challenge, and promoting them means you don't lose another technician off the tools.

Pay the role properly. I always encourage organisations to position the planner between a senior technician and a supervisor, both in career progression and in remuneration. If you don't, and the move means a pay cut once overtime disappears, your best technicians will quietly decline and you'll end up appointing whoever is left.

And be very careful about appointing non-technical planners. In Australian mining there has been a trend of moving planner roles off site and giving them to people without a technical background. It usually happens because whoever made the decision sees the planner as an administrator who moves work orders through the CMMS, rather than as someone preparing work for efficient execution.

Two things then happen, and neither is good.

Either the preparation simply doesn't happen, and your technicians find out in the field. Parts aren't there. The scope is wrong. The steps are incomplete or in the wrong order.

Or the preparation quietly migrates back to your execution team. Your supervisor or a senior technician works out the parts, the steps and the materials, puts it all in an email, and sends it to the planner to type into the CMMS.

That's duplicate handling, it's slow, and it wastes 2 people's time to do one person's job.

It also happens far more often than anyone admits.

One last thing. If everybody plans, nobody plans. If you spread planning across several people without a rigid split by trade or by area, you will find out how true that is.

If you want to build the skills before you have the title, PS400 is a short frontline course that covers how planning and scheduling works from a technician's point of view. It's the cheapest way to find out whether this is for you.

If you're already in the role, or about to be, PS200 is the full planning and scheduling course.

And if you're the one building the function, PS100 adds the implementation framework for putting it all in place.