I almost quit procurement after 2 months.
I also almost quit a few more times.
It took me a long time to find my place in the world of procurement.
So here’s my story. I’ve had emails and YouTube comments asking how I found my groove in procurement. It wasn’t easy.
Two months into my procurement career, I had enough. I was working at the Ministry of Defence in the UK - on a civil service graduate scheme at Dstl - the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. A pretty cool, unique, and secretive place that pushes the early research and defence capabilities of the UK armed forces. I was met with some wonderful tech during onboarding.
Then I got into the commercial team, which does both procurement and contracting.
My first month consisted of reading volumes of defence buying procurement policies, working on basic spreadsheets to track spend, and asking for more work each day only to be told to read more policies. Go learn the stuff that, if I’m being honest, only a small % of people actually know off by heart. Why learn it all when you could pick up the general ideas of how to procure in the civil service and know that there’s likely a policy to look through and adhere to no matter what you buy.
I felt like I had stepped back in time.
Most people still spent time printing documents to review in detail rather than collaborating digitally. (This is kinda a minor non-negative point. I’m a big fan of analogue, and used to do this when reading contracts etc. It’s more to pull together a broader picture of the world I entered).
Most people still spent the majority of their time writing minutes. One of those things you have to do to explain what your process was when procuring said thing.
I used to give quick context on the requirement, and then bullet point concisely, without being verbose, the approach and any updates.
To many of the old guard, this was too modern. I should treat this like prose and draft my days away, not doing the actual work, but writing about the small amount of work I actually did, inflating my thought process, and spending a 5:1 ratio of my time on BS like this rather than getting work done.
I know that this is still ongoing today. If you ever hear derision towards public sector procurement from me, this is why.
That was enough for me.
I told my line manager for my grad scheme that this sucked. I effectively said this isn’t what I signed up for. I’ve spent two months writing minutes about minor tasks and worked with the policy team to improve a few policies which had moved at a snail’s pace.
She moved me under a new mentor who, fortunately, saved my view of what procurement could do as we exited an FM provider, brought in a new one, brought in a new team, and brought in a new supply chain that was previously outsourced.
Still, the work was slow; I spent 80% of my time bored and mindless, but it was enough to keep my interest.
I assumed this was earning your stripes. You had to earn the trust.
I move around doing some strategic sourcing on large defence frameworks, and working on getting those in place etc before deciding to go venture out to private sector. But naively so, I joined AWE. The atomic weapons company that was private sector run by Lockheed Martin, worked 9 day fortnights, but worked even more backwards.
I won’t go into this one much but I left after 5 months to preserve my 2 week notice period before it became a 3 month period. I secured a consultant role at Dstl, the place I left 5 months earlier, tripled my salary, and went there for another year and a half. This was better. Same BS, some people issues as people knew me and new I worked efficiently, was a force of change, and was earning more than all of them for similar works. But we made it work.
I then left that role and spend time across private and public sector, but being more fussy over the roles I took. I had money on the bank, I took my summers off, and I intentionally took on roles that let me flex three things:
Supply chain work
Procurement
Contract and legal work
My goal was to be the very best at each of these and combine them.
Like this Venn diagram. I was obsessed with this. But in part I knew this was temporary. I had this creative force in me. So I started learning marketing back in 2017, ran a business on the side, grew social media accounts, and learnt the hustle of marketing in the age of social media.
I saw more procurement technology companies growing and coming up. I thought that could be a good future.
Heck, perhaps this content thing I’m doing here could pay the bills (spoiler… it could if I wanted it to), but I like tech and building the future of procurement.
Because of all the BS I’ve seen. All of the unfulfilling work I’ve endured. There’s a large amount of work today that we should never touch. We should have intelligence difigral workers and assistants doing this work for us.
90% of the first 5 years of my careee could have been handled by the autonomous digital workers I encounter in my day job, working for Pactum. For some this might scare them.
For me, I sigh a sigh of almighty relief. People talk about the fear of the younger generation getting into procurement if we take away the types of work I’ve noted. I disagree fundamentally with this. I fear that no one will want to work with suppliers should this work continue to be the work that we humans must take on. It’s not fulfilling.
I’ll pause for now as I write this slightly rawer piece of content on my commute into the office.
It’s a hill that I’ll die on. We shouldn’t be doing much of the work that currently takes up our time. Most of the proper work is pushed aside as we tick off enough checkbox item that is super important but we shouldn’t be doing it any longer.
Not do we secure an engaged and highly capable workforce.
I do believe we’re going radical shift in the work we do versus the work intelligent machines do.
I’d much rather be doing the work, that governs what the intelligent machines do, than the work we currently do, that the intelligent machines will or are already doing.
Automation via workflows already had the capability to significantly reduce the amount do work a typical procurement pro would do.
Some of you will have experienced that and maybe still are. The capability of agents, to do work for us, greatly exceees this.