Ask most people what procurement is and they'll say something about buying things. If they're being generous, they might say "supply chain." What they almost certainly won't say is: one of the most strategically important, intellectually interesting, and genuinely impactful functions in any organisation. And yet that's exactly what it is — and what it's becoming more so every year.
I've been in procurement and supply chain for my entire career. I have an MBA and MCIPS Chartered status. I've advised organisations ranging from fast-growing SMEs to major public sector bodies on how they buy, how they build their supply chains, and how technology changes both. I'm not neutral on the subject. But I am honest about it, and here's what I know: if I were starting out today, I would still choose this field.
Let's start by getting rid of the image of someone raising purchase orders. That is procurement in its most administrative form, and it is increasingly the work that AI handles. What the profession actually involves — at its best — is far more interesting:
The profession has been on a quiet upward trajectory for two decades, but several things have happened recently that have accelerated it considerably.
COVID-19 exposed the fragility of lean, just-in-time supply chains that had been optimised purely for cost. Overnight, resilience became as important as efficiency. The organisations that weathered the disruption best were those with diverse supplier bases, strong supplier relationships, and procurement teams who understood the dependencies in their supply chain. The ones that struggled had optimised cost at the expense of everything else. That lesson has not been forgotten.
For anyone interested in public sector procurement specifically — and public sector procurement is £434 billion a year in the UK — the Procurement Act 2023 represents a generational shift. New requirements for transparency, SME access, and social value are creating demand for procurement expertise at every level of government. The number of skilled procurement professionals the public sector needs to implement these changes effectively significantly exceeds the current supply.
Counterintuitively, the automation of procurement's administrative work is good news for the profession. It removes the parts that were always below the capability of the people doing them, and elevates the work that requires genuine expertise. The junior procurement role of the future involves less data entry and more analysis. The senior procurement role involves less process management and more strategy. Both are more interesting than what existed before.
The CIPS/Hays Salary Survey 2025 puts the average UK procurement salary at £54,576 — and that's the average, not the ceiling. Category managers in specialist areas — technology, energy, pharmaceutical supply chains — command significantly more. CPOs at major organisations earn well into six figures. The profession is not underpaid. It is, if anything, undervalued relative to what it delivers.
CIPS — the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply — provides the professional qualification framework for the industry, from foundation certificates right through to MCIPS Chartered status. It's the equivalent of ACA for accountants or MRICS for surveyors: a recognised, rigorous, and genuinely valued credential.
What's interesting about CIPS is that it's practically grounded. The syllabus covers commercial law, supply chain risk, category management, contract management, and negotiation — the actual substance of the work, not abstract theory. Many practitioners study while working, applying the frameworks directly to live problems.
If I had to describe the qualities that make someone excellent at procurement, they look something like this:
It would be dishonest to write a piece about procurement careers without mentioning the platform I founded. Bundle IQ was built from my experience in this profession — the belief that the expertise I've spent a career developing should be accessible to every organisation, not just the ones that can afford it. That doesn't diminish the profession. If anything, it elevates it: by making procurement intelligence accessible at scale, we create more organisations that understand what good procurement looks like, which creates more demand for the professionals who can deliver it.
The procurement professionals I most admire aren't threatened by better tools. They use them, and they spend the time they save on the work that only they can do.
IQ On-Site brings MCIPS-level expertise into your organisation — for the work that needs it, when it needs it.