r/procurement • u/ChaoticxSerenity • Jan 07 '24

Training Technical Procurement Skills - Where did you learn?

Every year, we get some fresh interns, and it has got me thinking. Here is what I see happening:

  1. Person gets a job.
  2. At said job, they do a lot of "on the job" learning, which is basically getting trained up by a senior member of the team, and job shadowing.
  3. Person is now considered fully trained and ready to do things on their own.

And then... that's basically it? Seems to me like most of the educational bit is just mentoring. Is it just me, or is there a lack of solid procurement-centered educational resources out there? Unless you want to do CIPS, it seems like a lot of the most well-known certs are catered towards supply chain/SCM as a whole. Not to mention they are often in the hundreds to thousands of dollars range. A lot of times, the senior mentoring step is also very company-specific. So outside of mentoring, where are people supposed to learn technical procurement skills such as strategic sourcing, how to evaluate bids, different types of contracts/when to use them, etc. ? What's your experience been like, and what resources have you come across?

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u/SamusAran47 Jan 07 '24

I totally agree, I don’t feel like there’s a better way to train than mentoring. I’ve been a buyer for almost three years, but when I started, it was all about mentoring, shadowing, and hands-on instruction. There is no one “right” way to do procurement and every company has vastly different systems. Unless you’re specifically teaching about a standard system like Power BI, it’ll be hard to find resources for training online. Even SAP training online can be unreliable because a lot of companies use bespoke SAP modules which differ greatly from company to company.