What's a procurement career really like?

My goddaughter - a Gen Zer who wants to draw anime all the time and thinks that's enough for her in life - once asked me, "What do you do?" It didn't take much to explain, in a single Signal message, the web I operate in. She sent back an anime character image - the one that shows tears, panic, complexity, shock, and every other emotion rendered in lines and water drops. "That is so cool and so complex! I would never be able to work in such an environment." - she added.

What I took from this brief exchange was two things. First, her conclusions were drawn too fast - she would perfectly fit procurement career. Second, she was right that the work is cool and complex, but that complexity rarely shows up in job descriptions or CVs. It's something those of us in the field know about but don't expose well or often enough.

So I thought I'd write this article as a reflection - a lens on my own experience across 14 years in procurement, spanning 4 industries, 6 countries, and both direct and indirect sourcing.

Let's start.

Tell someone you work in procurement and watch their face puzzle over it. So you… buy things? Sort of. But not really. 

I've described the work for years as being the spider in the web. You sit in the middle of a network you helped spin but don't own, connected by a thread to every function that needs something. Each one pulls a thread. Each pull moves you.

But the web isn't only spun outward toward people who want to buy something. It also runs laterally, through every gate that has to clear before a purchase is even allowed to happen.

Procurement doesn't just connect the buyer to the supplier - it facilitates the machinery around the decision.

Risk assessments. Legal reviews. Finance and accounting checks. Compliance approvals. Sustainability questionnaires. Information security due diligence. This list is long. Each of these is its own world, with its own owners, its own timelines, its own threshold for what "good enough" means. Procurement is the one that gathers them, sequences them, chases the ones that are late, translates between them when their requirements conflict, and somehow produces a single yes-or-no from what should have been a week-long committee debate.

That facilitation looks different depending on where you sit. In tech, it might mean running an information security review on a SAAS supplier who touches customer data - because the engineering team wants to move fast and the CISO wants seventeen controls evidenced before sign-off, and both of them are right. In pharma, it might mean sourcing active pharmaceutical ingredients and not just negotiating price but facilitating a quality audit, a regulatory filing check, a supply chain risk mapping, and a dual-sourcing strategy in case the sole manufacturer fails an inspection. In medical devices, it means navigating suppliers whose components are traceable to the screw, because a single non-conformance can trigger a recall. In banking, especially now under DORA, it means onboarding a critical ICT third-party provider through operational resilience assessments, concentration risk analysis, exit strategy documentation, and contractual clauses that didn't exist three years ago.

That was one paragraph. A category manager does this daily.

The web is the job. The buying is just an outcome.

The part the job description leaves out, and it's the thing that but the one that actually shapes the career: you get measured on an outcome you can't produce alone. Savings targets, supplier performance, contract compliance, risk mitigation - every one of them depends on people who don't report to you, processes you don't own, and decisions that were made before you arrived. You influence. You negotiate. You escalate when you must. But you rarely command. The job teaches you, very early and very bluntly, that control is an illusion and influence is the real currency. Most procurement professionals I know have learned this the hard way - usually around year two and after a few hours of tears.

The crueler realization is that for all the hours spent spinning, holding, and repairing the web the only measure that counts at the end of the year is, still, savings.

Accountability without authority - and recognition without visibility - is where the complexity lives.

The path is real, but the timeline is a fiction

There is a clean version of the career ladder. You start as an analyst, a buyer, a purchasing assistant, doing spend reviews and vendor research and the small negotiations where you learn how the function actually supports the business. You move to category manager or strategic sourcing manager, owning a slice of spend and leading the strategy on it. At the top sits the CPO, running the whole thing.

What the ladder diagram never shows is that there's no clock attached to it. Some people reach category manager in three years; some are still buyers at fifty. The variables that decide it are mostly not about you: how the company is structured, how often people above you leave, where the central function physically sits, and the local politics of who gets seen. If you're stuck, it is very rarely a verdict on your ability. It's usually the shape of the org you happen to be standing in.

Not everyone is even aiming up. Plenty of good people make lateral moves on purpose, trading the climb for range, because breadth across categories is its own kind of expertise. Though the field is ambivalent about that too. Move from marketing procurement to buying metal parts and you'll meet the stereotype that category knowledge doesn't travel, even as everyone insists it does. Some at industry conferences now argue the category manager itself is on the way out, replaced by more fluid, cross-cutting roles. Specialist-versus-generalist tension never resolves; it just moves around.

Expected to know everything, trained in almost none of it

Another interesting angle to the role is that you're expected to become an instant expert in whatever you're buying this quarter, read the regulations around it, model the finances, research the market, manage the suppliers, and coordinate across departments that don't report to you. Formal training for most of this is nonexistent. You learn it live.

The shorthand people reach for is the "T-shaped" professional: deep in one area, broad across many. The vertical is contract law, financial modelling, data analysis, and lately enough fluency with AI tools to get a usable answer out of them. The horizontal is the harder half. Communicating, negotiating, and managing a room full of stakeholders who each want something different and none of whom talks with each other, more so you can order around. Henry Mintzberg, describing organisations full of clever specialists all competing for influence, borrowed a French phrase for it: un panier de crabes, a bucket of crabs. Anyone who has sat in a cross-functional sourcing meeting knows the feeling.

Certifications sit oddly on top of all this. CIPS, ISM, and the rest carry real weight in UK- and US-headquartered companies and much less elsewhere; at some large European groups they won't move your salary a euro, while at the right employer they open the door. The skills transfer across industries better than the credentials do. Which is why so many strong procurement people didn't train for it at all. They fell in from finance, engineering, marketing, or operations, and found the core of the work was reasoning about value and people.

The way out of the roadblock trap

If the job is being accountable for other people's cooperation, then the whole career turns on one skill: getting people who see you as an obstacle to want what you want. The practitioners I've watched do this best share three moves:

• They speak the internal customer's language instead of procurement's.
• They pull those stakeholders into the work early, so the outcome has their fingerprints on it.
• And they hand back the wins as shared wins, not procurement trophies.

It sounds soft. It's the most strategic thing in the job. It converts the person who would have gone around you into the person who brings you in, and it's the difference between realising x% of your savings and realising most of them. The rest of the career compounds off that.

The AI story, minus the hype

Which brings us to the anxiety in every procurement forum right now: is a machine about to do all this?

The headline numbers are loud. KPMG's own pilots found up to 80% time savings on some procurement tasks, and it estimates 50 - 80% of the work could be automated, eliminated, or pushed to self-service.

Then look at what's actually deployed. The Hackett Group found that 49% of procurement teams had piloted generative AI in 2024 - double the year before - but only 4% had reached large-scale deployment. Deloitte's global CPO research tells the same story from the other side: 92% of chief procurement officers are assessing or planning AI, and 37% are actually piloting or deploying it. The gap between the slide and the shop floor is the whole point. Procurement is very busy talking about AI and comparatively quiet about running it.

What's really being automated is the transactional layer, the part nobody went into the career for anyway: purchase orders, invoice processing, routine supplier due diligence, standard reporting, the first pass at spend data. What stays stubbornly human is everything the roadblock problem is made of. The judgment call in a messy negotiation. The relationship that turns a blocker into a sponsor. The read on a supplier that no dashboard gives you. The ethical trade-off.

AI eating the transactional half doesn't shrink the job. It raises the price of the human half, because when the busywork is gone, the only thing left to be measured on is the part that was always the hard bit.

The people who do well won't be the ones who "embrace AI" as a slogan. They'll be the ones who were already good at the part AI can't touch.

So, is it for you?

I won't pretend it's a calm career. The pressure to cut costs can be relentless, the politics are real, and a function that's accountable for everyone's cooperation and armed with none of their authority will hand you the occasional very long week. Procurement isn't for everyone.

But if you like sitting where the threads cross, if you'd rather solve a tangle of people and constraints than execute a tidy task list, if you want work that's both recession-proof and never twice the same, it's a genuinely good place to build a career. Just don't take the job description at its word, ever.

Because the real skill was never buying things.