Develop the workforce skills of your talents to empower your procurement team

complexity more easily, improve efficiency and adopt best practices to ensure the long-term success of your organisation. Skill Dynamics, in partnership with Supply Chain Management Review, took a closer look at this subject for the procurement function through their study "Skills Report 2025: Supply chain and procurement trends". We reveal the key learning that shed light on the job market in general, and particularly regarding the procurement function.

Today’s key skills

The first essential skills for any buyer are interpersonal abilities. These capabilities are most expected by procurement teams themselves, but also by companies during recruitment. And for good reason - in a constantly evolving environment, technical skills and theoretical knowledge may lose relevance, while "soft skills" remain timeless. Tomorrow’s buyers will need to cultivate their emotional intelligence:

• Their communication skills;
• Their ability to influence;
• Their active listening;
• Their empathy;
• Their openness;
• Their creativity.

Of course, there are also significant needs in terms of "hard skills". With the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), skills involving purely human cognitive functions are particularly sought after. You know, these are abilities that allow interaction with one’s environment, such as perceiving things around us, reasoning autonomously, understanding and communicating with others. For the procurement function, this means mastering supplier management, procurement strategy, negotiation or project management, for example.

In parallel, certain specific skills that require handling rather confidential and sensitive data are also valued. These include, for example, tasks such as financial management and/or contract management. It seems that procurement teams are not yet comfortable enough to take initiatives and share this data with generative Artificial Intelligence.

Similarly, new skills are also emerging to address key challenges for tomorrow’s companies. These include mastery of ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) topics and new technologies (Machine Learning, generative Artificial Intelligence…).

Lastly, it’s interesting to note a certain gap between the skills expected of teams and those that buyers themselves consider important for their role. This is particularly the case in the areas of legal, digital and analytics, or category management.

How to strengthen these workforce skills?

Faced with this long list of skills expected from buyers, companies must take action. Beyond the recruitment phase, which must be conducted with precision, it becomes essential to dedicate time, effort and investment in training providers.

This is even more important for emerging topics, which are not yet fully mastered by all workers, as is the case for sustainable procurement, for example. Marline Weber, Responsible Sourcing Policy Officer at the French Ministry of Ecological Transition[1], is convinced: "It requires training, it requires being able to understand these issues. […] We provide tools, online training, in-person training, etc. and support programmes to develop your sustainable procurement strategy and have human advice in the territories to better understand these complex issues."

To boost the workforce skills of their teams, the vast majority of companies today rely on in-person training and e-learning. However, workers expect much more. They would rather have access to qualifications and academic courses as well as personalised e-learning, i.e. adapted to each person’s level and professional experience. In other words, they want to be able to enhance their careers through these training pathways but also acquire knowledge and skills that apply very concretely to their daily work.

"On-the-job training will always have its place as it deals with the nitty-gritty of the specific operation of that organisation, but we need to equip our employees with the art of the possible. You only know what you know, so as employers and managers we must enable creativity and innovation in our teams by building a foundation of best practice and knowledge and then encouraging them to look beyond. Show them that there is always another way - it’s up to them to create the process that fits their operation best," emphasises Adrian Preston, Head of Supply Chain Content Development and Solutions Consultant at Skill Dynamics[2].

Ultimately, whatever techniques are employed, measuring their effectiveness is important. Yet more than a third of the companies surveyed in the study skip this step. For the others, they combine several methods: They track performance improvement, evaluate employee satisfaction and/or rely on informal feedback from participants most of the time. It’s also possible to implement a simple questionnaire to collect feedback from the field at the end of the training journey.

The challenge of talent retention

Beyond performance, continuous training and developing workforce skills play a key role in their overall job satisfaction. These are fundamental elements that can also help build their professional development and strengthen their commitment to the company.

To date, procurement teams have succeeded in establishing their strategic positioning within the organisation. In fact, 90% of procurement professionals surveyed believe that the procurement function is valued within their organisation. However, they are not convinced by their employers’ training policies. Nearly a third state that training and development are not a priority in their organisation.

It is crucial to offer workers lifelong learning opportunities, as well as the necessary tools to progress in their profession and then evolve within the company. By investing in suitable programmes and encouraging a culture of learning, companies can not only boost the skills of their teams but also enhance their well-being, their involvement and thus their loyalty.

As you can understand, lifelong learning and development of skills are fundamental pillars for any organisation wishing to remain competitive and innovative. These skills, whether technical or behavioural, must be regularly updated to meet current and future market challenges. This is therefore the key to building resilient, efficient teams ready to tackle tomorrow’s challenges;