LinkedIn response

Thank you for responding to our survey

We’d like to thank everybody who kindly took the time to respond to our LinkedIn survey on the subject of problems facing procurement professionals today.

There was an enormous response, coming up with issues ranging from cultural, to co-operation, to career progression – from seasoned professionals and from those just starting up the rungs of their career ladder… and, of course, everyone else in between, whether securely employed or operating on a consultancy basis.

Some of those responses were fairly predictable and, if author and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is to be believed when he wrote “Hell is other people” all manner of “other people” popped up in these survey responses.

Hands up all those who’d started their career of keeping costs to a minimum by recording “Pick of the Pops” on a Sunday evening. So many of you? We can’t say we’re all that surprised.

In that spirit, we’ve decided to do our very own rundown over the next six months with our fortnightly Top Twelve Procurement Issues, in reverse order and without any kind of backing track.

We’ll be basing our rankings on the number of responses attributed to issue categories in general, meaning there’ll be a little bit of leeway when certain responses can refer to more than one category, like, say behaviour change. And whose behaviour should ideally be changing (Merci, Monsieur Sartre).

We’ll be looking at each of our Top Twelve Issues in terms of what respondents said they wanted … what they didn’t want … and what they considered an ongoing issue.

So although we’re still counting up the responses before counting them down over the next few months, you can be sure that there’s going to be some interesting reading waiting for you here.

We’re not going to mention any names, but we’re sure that many of you will recognise yourselves in what you’ve told us – and whether or not that’s the case we’d like to thank you all, once again, for your responses.