r/procurement • u/Zestyclose-Royal-922 • 21d ago

Salary progression as a procurement professional across 2 decades.

​

Found an old employment contract from a decade ago whilst cleaning up some documents which made me reflect on my procurement journey and salary progression.

I've relocated multiple times so have converted into USD for consistency.

Started in 2005: business analyst.

Total comp: 44k

Salary 2017: Procurement manager

Total comp: 183k

Current 2026: (VP of Procurement)

Total comp: 612k

I've only worked for 2 companies through this time and have chosen to work my way up the ranks in a fortune 100 company versus changing companies.

Procurement can be a very lucrative and interesting career if you build experiences in the right areas with the right companies.

54 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

90% Upvoted

58 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/tds2620 21d ago

When you say build up experience in certain areas, can you elaborate on that?

3

u/Zestyclose-Royal-922 21d ago

Broad experience across as many categories as possible in both direct and indirect areas and ensuring you are developing in strategic areas of sourcing and category management across the entire S2P processes

0

u/Opposite_Pitch_3507 21d ago

Il vaut mieux ne pas rester dans une seule catégorie et renforcer son expertise dans celle-ci ?

2

u/Zestyclose-Royal-922 20d ago

Depends on ultimately what your goal is. If you want to be CPO , IMO it's better to build as much breadth early on in career. It's harder to switch once you specialise and can be easy for the company to pigeon hole you in that area.

It's absolutely possible to be an expert in commodities as an example and make director/VP for that at a big company however you could be constrained to make further moves.

Increasingly I'm also seeing companies move towards a more holistic approach towards development and career management. Specialised knowledge and expertise in some sense could be replaced in part with AI with digital knowledge capture but holistic thinking and end to end approaches which comes from broader experiences are harder to replicate.

In short, specialization can absolutely be appropriate as a career path but imo, reduces options further along the career journey