Procurement skills and employee career development
Procurement skill’s and employee career development – Build capability and provide opportunities for career progression for your team. Using clearly articulated and differentiated skill requirements across the procurement organization.
We take a look at a best practice approach to building procurement capability through employee career development using a skills assessment as the driving tool:
CPO’s in best-practice organizations recognize the need to invest in training, skill development, and career mentoring for their employees. They conduct a formal skill’s assessment to gain the data needed to understand the strengths and development needs of their procurement teams. They then use training and career development plans to enhance the skills and capabilities of their team members to contribute directly to organizations goals and objectives.
We believe that the direction of any training program should be driven by ‘hard quantifiable data’, not ‘soft subjective indicators’. Only by developing training programs based upon hard data, does the CPO have the credible data to steer their teams toward the next level of maturity.
Direction = Traction:
Our iProcure Platform, collects this data to provide a roadmap for each competency, individual, manager, and leader through:
- competency definitions
- job descriptions
- competency assessments
- skills gap identification
- training plans, and
- development and implementation of training programs
- bench strength monitoring and planning
By identifying key individuals and high performers, developing career and succession plans, iProcure Bench facilitates resource planning and career development opportunities. Identifying where skills reside in the organization to support decisions on internal key talent vrs. external hires when necessary.
Lightening the load of increased expectations:
CXO’s in leading organizations have an explicit expectation of professionalism for all procurement employees. These increased expectations have necessitated a higher level of professionalism and a longer-term growth mind-set within procurement.
By utilizing qualified providers, your company can develop the talents of it’s staff either with or without a dedicated learning and development team to identify opportunities for skill enhancement. Using the right skills assessment tool you can review the technical procurement skill sets of employees:
- category management,
- sourcing management,
- supplier relationship management,
- operational procurement
- negotiation,
you can also evaluate employees’ management skills, such as:
- cost management,
- financial analysis
- risk management,
- project management
- operations management
and leadership skills, such as:
- strategy & business acumen
- leadership and influencing
- managing individuals and teams,
- corporate social responsibility
Skill’s Gap Analysis will identify areas for improvement you may also include post learning follow – up to help employees apply skills learned in training.
Summary:
Leaders recognize that, talent intelligence is the basis of every “people” decision they make; without it, they would be reduced to hiring, firing and promoting people at random.
Key capabilities include:
- focusing development programs on organizational goals and objectives,
- measure each employee’s skill level in key areas, on which to base training requirements
- plan for multi-level employee engagement throughout the development program
- measure learning throughout the development program
- plan for post learning knowledge transfer in key areas
Organizations must identify the critical competencies their teams require to make the desired contribution to the business objectives. They must collect ‘hard data’ to develop a skills baseline for these competencies in which to develop the capability of their team. Critically, such data must come from a credible and reliable skills assessment tailored to the organization’s needs.
Nuff said…
Learn more about the iProcure Platform