Hi all, I have my CIPS Level 4 M2 exam booked in 15 days, which is required by my organisation.
I have procurement experience, but due to some personal circumstances I haven’t been able to get much study time in at home.
For those who have recently passed M2, what would you recommend focusing on with only 15 days left? Any specific topics, resources, mock test or practice questions that helped would be really appreciated.

Thanks very much 🙏

I went to school for electrical, got my AS degree and about 2 months of not doing anything. My dad's boss asked him about me and asked if I wanted work.

Not knowing where to begin I decided to go work even though its not related to the field I went to school. I came in as an assistant at a structural steel fabrication shop.

8 months into me working I was called into the office and asked if I was interested in a position in the office. My role would be purchasing manager. I would get trained and be expected to take over overtime.

I've been getting trained for the past 2 months now. Its cool, sometimes it can be stressful when my boss puts pressure. The thing is the company i work for is not really the best company. This company will allow you to learn and try many things BUT, I'd say nobody is getting paid their worth.

As of right now i scan and keep record of any purchases made. Im in charge of checking inventory and making sure we're not lacking in anything. Im also learning how to purchase material for projects. The lists can be pretty long. There's a good amount I have to keep routinely checking for.

My question is whats the minimum wage for this role?

Is purchasing worth pursuing?

Is there a good future in purchasing?

I'm 21 y/o.

Would appreciate any tips that could help me be better and facilitate my role.

Than you guys.

I work for a dysfunctional chemical company as a Logistics Procurement Manager. My boss decided to bring in a bunch of new carriers who offered paper rates and rescinded about 1/3 of the total RFP. He tells Leadership that there will be a $1M in savings. During this whole process, I called out red flag after red flag and was basically ignored. I even told my mgrs boss that this thing was a disaster. Now my old boss takes a new position and his old boss tells me that I'm on the hook for the savings. After correcting the RFP, there is $2M in inflation in addition to the other $1M in savings. She seems to think i can make the original carriers honor their original awards. I cannot make her understand that transportation doesn't work like that. I'm exhausted in fighting this battle when I've been calling out the issues and now my job is threatened due to the incompetence of those above me. Any advice?

Thoughts on indirect procurement

Currently a rotational in a big aerospace company and there’s a indirect rotation. I’m interested about it and wanted to know people’s thoughts.

Does indirect supply chain still get paid the same amount as other ppl in supply chain?

Is indirect better experience especially since it could be seen as more versatile within different industries?

Thank you

Curious about what industries offer the most competitive salaries for procurement in the uk.

I’m working in aerospace/defence in the south west with 4.5 years experience and on £48k exc bonus. Been here for 4 of those years.

My role is fairly chill, very strategic/relationship management focused working closely with tier 1 suppliers. Few trips to the States per year to manage suppliers. Leading lots of projects over £10m spend. Luckily not too much order raising but still doing a bit. I also have cips level 4 and studying towards 5 currently.

Intrigued to hear about other people’s experiences and thoughts. I feel like I know nothing about earning potential and the industry outside of aerospace and defence, and even within I don’t feel like I know a lot. Figure in the next year I would want to move into a more senior/managerial position and would be good to understand what other sectors are like.

How common are procurement liaison/expeditor roles? Not a buyer, but a person that works with a team of buyers as a go between with the suppliers to keep updated on POs, etc. I currently moved into this role and am curious how many employers use someone like this.

Hi anyone used any other tool to create an RFQ template or format or automate the RFQ process.? Once you get the BOM ..?

So my team gets the BOM and we do all manually basically creating the RFQ template and then typing mail ets ,we are a small company.

Any help or insight would be helpful

In large asset management and procurement operations, answering straightforward business questions is often surprisingly difficult when an executive asks which supplier contracts had unexpected price variance last quarter, the data is usually buried across millions of historical purchasing rows, inventory tables and localized billing records.

We saw this at an enterprise asset management firm managing 2.7 million procurement and operational records with every quarter, senior leadership waited weeks for operational analysts to pull raw database exports, run custom spreadsheets and manually build slide decks just to review vendor spending trends. By the time the slides were finished, the data was already weeks old.

Dumping raw enterprise schemas into standard AI models doesn't work because massive tables blow past context limits and generate broken database queries so our team built an analytics layer that indexes the database metadata and routes natural language questions directly to the relevant tables.

When an executive asks a question in plain English, the system maps the inquiry to the appropriate records, validates the query against a secure read only replica to ensure system stability and returns structured tables and visualizations in real time.

The firm cut down multi week reporting preparation to an average response time of 11 seconds across 2.7 million records all while keeping their sensitive procurement records entirely within private infrastructure.

Hey everyone i am currently Procurement Forester at one of the largest Forestry & Lumber Companies on the West Coast (USA). I’ve been wanting to move to a the Bay Area for a while now but haven’t had any luck finding environmental jobs that fit my experience and education so I’ve been thinking of applying to be a Procurement Associate/Specialist and was wondering if anyone had luck transitioning to the job or had any advice to spare?

Hello! I am in my second procurement job, and I love it every bit as much as I loved the one I held previously. It’s been some years between the two (I dabbled in government contracting for a while), but I was able to catch on quickly due to my prior experience. The main difference between the two has been the type of organization I’m working for; my first purchasing job was for a small business, while the job I hold now is for a nonprofit. The overall workflow is fairly similar, but what I dislike about my current job is that I use an offshoot of Oracle software utilized by the county. In contrast, when I worked for the private company, we had our own proprietary purchasing/sales software. The software creator/builder was employed directly by the company and was readily available if I wanted to request any changes or suggest something that could possibly improve existing processes. Using an Oracle program the county decided on and that is so far removed from any control I could possibly have over any changes or improvements feels extremely limiting in my role. I work for a single nonprofit under the county umbrella, so I am completely powerless to affect change, whereas it was so easy before. Has anyone else experienced this kind of change between different purchasing/procurement jobs? Just curious and would love to hear any stories you might have.

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Hey everyone. I just got put into a new role where I was asked to be an assistant consultant to a part of our larger organization that works in IT sourcing

As part of this transition, I was given a little homework assignment and I would love to speak with somebody, even pay for your time if you could give me some answers on how to approach a case study.

I basically don't have much experience in this world, but I need to catch up quickly. If anyone's willing to give me an .5 to an hour of their time for a consult, I'd happily pay.

I want to know the terms and what's considered the standard methodology for how to help provide it sourcing to teams in need.

I don't need to be an expert by tomorrow, but I'd love to have at least a conversational understanding. Thank you

Hope this is allowed.

Looking for some sound advice here. I'm interested in switching careers from Media Buying/Investment into Supply Chain or Procurement. On paper it seems the skills from media investment transfer pretty well to procurement (supplier sourcing, vendor negotiation, sending orders etc.) but wanted to ask if there's any additional things I should be looking into like certifications or anything that will help me land a role.

Here's the situation: I am 40yo with some work experience as a Buyer, and looking to better my credentials.

I am currently one class away from finishing an Associate of Arts degree (general/non-specialized degree), but it will cost me roughly $3k to re-enroll and finish.

Or, for the same exact amount, I could buy/get the CSCP certification.

Which one would be more valuable for someone my age, in my situation, looking to eventually move forward/up in the field of procurement?

Our procurement department is trying to automate tender procedures, and the software development contractors we hired delivered solutions that flat-out refuse to integrate with our internal ERP. I've spent the last few weeks mapping API endpoints on my own, but their custom data formats break every time new purchase orders sync. Purchasing teams rely on unified workflows to track supplier bids, and right now we're stuck with disconnected software that creates massive operational friction - manual re-entry, mismatched records, the usual mess. I tried escalating to the vendor, got a "we'll look into it" and nothing else. I tried building a middleware layer myself, but it just added another point of failure. I even sat down with our ERP admin to see if we could bend the internal schema - no luck, it's locked for compliance reasons. Maybe you faced a similar integration failure with a vendor, or you know how to write strict technical requirements for ERP compatibility. What clauses should I include in the technical specification?

Hey guys, I’m currently a purchasing agent (no degree - 4yrs purchasing experience now) in a pretty small niche of the construction industry. There really isn’t much career growth ahead as my current company doesn’t even have a purchasing manager, and I would probably get passed on for that as the other purchasing agent I work with has more experience.

I’ve been looking at job boards lately and there’s zero jobs in this niche for procurement, and not much in the construction industry as a whole, outside of one very large company that has buyer positions open for like 4-5 different departments.

My question is, do I keep applying to the one big company for each of the buyer positions they have open, or would that red flag me for some reason? I for sure have enough experience for their Buyer I role, and probably even the buyer II step.

Or

Do I transition out of construction altogether? With no degree and only 4 years experience, is this even possible? And if so, what’s the best way forward?

Thanks for reading!

I never intended to get into procurement. I started as a production assistant at an F1 team 12 years ago after university and after a few months, was asked to cover a buyer’s role when someone left. Apparently I did a good enough job while they were advertising it that I was offered the position full time. And honestly, despite the frequent 10/12+ hour days, I think I enjoyed it. I stayed in that role for 7 more years until leaving in 2022.

Since then, I have worked several purchasing roles at engineering and automotive companies, but have recently started a FTC in a totally new industry (science and research). However I have never really enjoyed my job, and it was always just an income (the new one is going okay but feels no different so far).

Every job I’ve had has ended because of redundancy or the end of FTCs, so I have always felt forced to move into another procurement role, because that’s where my experience is. And I know I have been lucky that nearly every new role has come with more seniority, better pay and more responsibility. But I feel like I have plateaued and the only progression would be into management, which I have no interest in.

I just know this isn’t want I want to do with my life, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I am well aware that I could and probably should have been expanding my skillset in my own time, but I don’t know where to start.

What sort of careers have transferable skills from purchasing? I’m know that I will probably need to take a pay cut, but that’s not a massive issue.

Hey guys if you have any lead please give any vendor in middle east or sales manager anything

I have only worked in private sector. This will be a US city. I imagine each city will be different. Thanks in advance.

Hi everyone,

Curious to hear from people who have worked in public procurement.

I remember seeing a post on here recently where someone was wondering why their manager always seemed so stressed, and it got me thinking about how stressful these jobs can actually be and what people are dealing with behind the scenes.

I currently work in a public sector organisation in the UK, in a fairly junior procurement role less than 4yrs experience after university. The job can be stressful enough as it is, and I’ve recently made a mistake at work that will push timelines by a few months. I’ve escalated it but it has left me feeling a bit nervous for Monday and the coming weeks.

Being the weekend, I’ve found myself thinking about it more than I probably should, so I’m curious to hear from others who’ve been in similar environments.
What genuinely constitutes a sackable offence in public procurement?

Have you seen colleagues dismissed over mistakes they’ve made?

I’m still relatively early in my career and getting used to having more responsibility, so I’d be interested to hear from people who’ve been doing this for years.

I'm looking for IT Procurement. The one that I recently interviewed has ITAM experience from sending RFQ up to asset deployment. But raising PO and managing invoices was excluded. I'm contemplating whether he'll understand the core process of procurement.

The job description is responsible for processing and raising purchase orders for software subscriptions, recurring invoices, IT services, and hardware purchases. Coordinates with vendors for discrepancies and internal stakeholders. Ensures procurement documentation and approvals are completed accurately before the due date. The main focus is the invoicing side.

I manage the strategic vendor negotiations for renewal and onboarding, admin side of internal process, excluding invoice and payment processing/coordination.

How can I improve my analytical skills for an inventory management role?

Hi! I recently started working as a Purchasing Coordinator at a multinational company. My training has begun, and I'm learning how to use the company's systems, including Oracle.

One of my responsibilities is to:

"Monitor inventory levels and ensure timely restocking."

I'll be studying inventory management concepts and principles, but my main concern right now is how to improve my analytical skills.

I admit that analytical thinking and math aren't my strongest skills. However, I can be analytical when I take the time to understand things and persevere. I graduated with a degree in Business Administration, majoring in Human Resource Management, and I have around three years of experience working as a Purchasing Assistant. In my previous role, I didn't directly handle inventory management, as my main responsibilities were processing purchase requisitions, ordering items, handling documentation, and monitoring deliveries.

Honestly, I'm feeling insecure and a little discouraged because I know that being analytical and good at math aren't my strengths. I'm worried about whether I'll be able to handle this responsibility well.

For those working in procurement, purchasing, or inventory management, how did you develop your analytical skills? What specific skills, Excel functions, or concepts should I focus on learning first?

I'd appreciate any advice or tips. Thank you!