A career in procurement – an Olympian effort

Posted on 16. Apr, 2009 by in Blog

A question I often ask procurement executives is whether or not they would recommend a career in procurement to their kids – I find it can be an excellent indicator for how highly regarded the profession currently is. (Afterall, if those who already do it won’t recommend it to their own children, what hope do we have?)

The reason I ask the question is to try and understand the talent crisis facing procurement. Whether it’s CPOs struggling to hold on to staff or not enough bright young things coming through, it’s clear that something must be done to raise the profile of procurement as a viable profession.

There are many ways of doing this. Ton Trommelen at DSM International partners with universities and business schools (as do several others), Nestle has established its own internal procurement university to train people up, Centrica employs a buddying system to help develop its people…

Different strokes for different folks.

So I was interested to read an article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, sponsored by the UK government, with the aim of attracting bright graduates to its Government Procurement Service, which established a graduate training programme to help attract and develop recent graduates.

One of the comments in particular from a graduate who is on the course makes interesting reading and highlights the problems the profession is facing very well.

“Procurement wasn’t a profession that I or any of my fellow trainees had ever considered. We were all looking at graduate schemes at the milk round and the GPSGS [government's graduate training programme] was new at the time we applied,” said Leigh Kopec, a graduate trainee who is now working on the Olympics project. “People know what buyers are, but I don’t think a lot of people know what procurement is. It sounded interesting and the more I found out about it, the more interested I became.

While we naturally have to take the article with a pinch of salt (it is sponsored, after all) it does highlight the type of issues senior procurement professionals face in getting bright young things on board.

But it also offers a bit of a lesson in how we can go about fixing it. Large organisations must get out there and show off their procurement capabilities at career fairs. Equally, CPOs must stand up and be counted – both within their own organisations and the wider world.

In fact it’s the latter which may well have the biggest effect. CPOs of large companies have an excellent opportunity to put their head above the parapet and shout about the value they are bringing to their organisations during this downturn. Whether this is blogging, commenting on news stories, sending out press releases, you name it, there’s a way to be heard in this connected world…

It’s time to tell the world how good a job procurement is doing because if you can’t do it now,  you never will be able to. It could provide the profession with a much-needed boost and attract the type of talent that wouldn’t have otherwise been available.

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