[Editor’s Note: We continue our “Throwback” series with another look at a past entry on the skills needed for today’s procurement leaders.]

Since poor procurement staff capabilities have been a thorn in the side of many Chief Procurement Officers through the years, we decided to publish an in-depth 16-part series – “Skills for the Modern Procurement Pro” – focused on the specific skills procurement departments (and individuals) should have in place in order to execute well. This included specific procurement areas like transactional procurement and supply risk management, as well as, more general skill areas like financial analysis and presentation skills. This series was built upon our ongoing and long-standing market research focused on procurement operations (strategies, processes, technologies, people, etc.) that is designed to both capture what is happening the market today and identify/develop the strategies and approaches that the industry can use to improve and accelerate results tomorrow and the next day and the next year, etc.

By completing the series, we effectively developed a robust “procurement competency matrix” that can be used to help procurement pros, managers, and CPOs understand and communicate what the required capabilities are for the roles and activities that exist in the procurement department and plan proactively. It’s important to note that while this list is indicative of the skills needed by a typical procurement department today, it was not designed with a specific job role in mind, and while it covers most of the bases, it was not intended to be an all-inclusive list of procurement competencies.

Nonetheless, we think it’s a highly valuable resource:

• For staffers, the list of skills (and our analysis) in the series can be used to perform an individual gap analysis to determine the relative strengths and/or holes that exist in a person’s skill sets. Staffers can also analyze which skills are more valuable to certain organizations or CPOs and plan their career development strategies accordingly. Each article in the series also provided direct recommendations/suggestions for pros to improve a specific skill and advance their careers.
• For managers, the series can help them identify, develop, and deploy the people with the right skills into the most suitable positions and help them think more broadly about resource allocation and training needs and budgets.
• For Chief Procurement Officers, the series can be used to help examine their teams and assess where current gaps exist between the needs of the department and enterprise and skills currently in place.

The series also presented the aggregate procurement department competency grades as scored by more than 250 CPOs and procurement executives. In total, the scores shown in the series were neither exceptional nor unsatisfactory and present a picture of a very middle-of-the-road set of skills residing within the typical procurement department. For the average procurement department, opportunities for improvement abound and, as such, we hope you take advantage of our Skills for the Modern Procurement Pro series to help jump-start your team, department, or individual career.

Tagged in: Ardent Partners Research, Chief Procurement Officer, CPO, People, Procurement Competency Matrix