Transitioning into Procurement?
Asked by Sheik
A majority of my work experience has come from working either as a dispatcher or scheduler with several major oil companies during my seven year career. Due to recent events I'm needing to prepare myself for something else outside of transportation logistics or dispatching. I have a limited amount of education however I'm still working towards completing my degree in business management. Unfortunately, I don’t have the option of using my existing company as a spring broad to help satisfy my procurement curiosity. With that being said how would you suggest a person transition into the procurement field without any prior experience? Houston,TX

Best Answer:
You need to develop a career plan, try a pathing and positioning approach. Check out www.alphasynergies.com to start.

gotta start small and hope you can even get it. your prev experience is with dispatcher/scheduler. to most that will look like admin. asst/customer service dept type of work. procurement and especially logistics require both the education and experience to qualify. you might get lucky and land something as an asst buyer or whatever but it should be difficult. I had lots of experience as a buyer for small companies and figured purchasing would be somethnig to get into. purchasing and buyer are two vastly different fields which I was unaware of. much like account manager or account executive, these sound the same but are differnt in their nature. depending on what the company looks for, one can be customer service oriented the other can be sales oriented. what I did before was considered purchasing, not buying. purchasing is place an order, get PO number and track shipment. buyers negotiate prices, forecast market trends, schedule delivery and lots of other stuff as well. logistics plans out who delivers what, where it goes, how fast it should get there, how much should be there etc. so for purchasing, you may have a shot a getting something good. but for procurement or buyer, it would be a very difficult road seeing how your biz mgmt has nothing really to do with procurement. there are specialized degrees in procurement/purchasing but I figure it's too late for you to turn back now. just try and land something in purchasing for now and hopefully you can work your way up to procurement in the future.
Answered by Dooberry