Confessions of a Corporate Shopaholic

In Part One I wrote about procurement salaries and I recently come across new United Kingdom data from The Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply (CIPS).  For those who are curious over the profession’s earning power, read on.

“Earning Power

By Supply Management magazine

Figures like that make procurement a real contender in the graduate jobs market. The profession is seen by many organisations as the department that saves money, and while purchasers were not immune to job cuts during the recession they have generally escaped the worst of the cull. And now, procurement recruiters are reporting a buoyant market post-recession as posts open up and buyers become more confident about switching jobs.

And salaries are holding up well. The general complaint in this resurgent procurement jobs market isn’t that there aren’t enough applicants, but that there aren’t enough of the right calibre, so employers are willing to pay more than average to get the right people.

For junior managers, which is entry level for graduates, pay is about on a par with the national average for similar jobs in other professions: £30,000 compared with an average of £29,650, according to the 2010 Purchasing & Supply Rewards research from CIPS and Croner Reward. This is ever so slightly less than you’d get in an equivalent position in IT (£30,904) or sales (£30,441), but a bit more than in finance, HR and marketing.

As you rise through the profession, though, you can expect the gap to grow. At senior manager level you would probably be earning in the region of £52,500, about £10,000 more than you would be in HR or marketing, and compared with a national average at this level of £45,000. The trend continues right up to director level, where the average for purchasing is £90,000. For HR this is £72,611, against a national average of £80,000.

It is only at director level that there is any discrepancy between the genders, with the women who responded to the survey (10 per cent of the directors who responded were female) saying they earnt an average of £78,000, compared with an average of £90,000 for the men.

Average bonuses reported in this year’s survey were £2,500, with the top earners getting £4,800. Middle managers generally ended up with about £2,160, and 29 per cent of all respondents received a bonus averaging £1,200.

Of course, reward isn’t all about the pay. Working conditions and job satisfaction are also part of the package. The news isn’t quite as rosy as far as working hours go. There has been a general increase over the past year in the number of hours procurement professionals work, although this is by no means unique to purchasing. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has recorded a rise in the number of hours worked across the UK as the economy recovers and labour demands grow. In procurement, this has meant that the biggest proportion of employees work 41 to 45 hours a week; last year the biggest proportion worked 40 hours a week.

Despite this, 54 per cent of survey respondents rated their job satisfaction as good or excellent. Almost all of them said that their job security was fair to excellent, and 77 per cent said they thought their total pay package was equal to or above market rates. A happy bunch, then – and with the right skills and abilities you could be well placed to join them.”