We used to hire procurement professionals for their ability to drive a hard bargain and manipulate a spreadsheet. Negotiation skills, analytical capability, maybe some category expertise. That was the job description for decades, and it served us reasonably well.

Those skills still matter. But they're no longer enough—and they're not even the most important things we're looking for anymore.

The Changing Nature of the Role

The transactional work that consumed most procurement hours is increasingly automated. Purchase orders flow through systems without human intervention. Catalogue buying handles routine requirements. AI is starting to read contracts and flag anomalies faster than any human could.

What's left—what can't be automated—is fundamentally different. Relationship building. Strategic thinking. Risk interpretation. Stakeholder influence. Emotional intelligence. The soft skills we used to consider nice-to-have are becoming the core competencies.

The modern procurement professional doesn't spend their day processing orders or updating spreadsheets. They spend it persuading a reluctant budget holder to consider a new supplier, navigating a complex negotiation where relationships matter more than leverage, or interpreting ambiguous data to make decisions under uncertainty.

These are human skills. And finding people who have them—combined with enough commercial acumen to be credible—is the new recruitment challenge.

The Skills Gap in Practice

Talk to any CPO about their biggest challenges, and talent appears near the top of every list. It's not that there aren't people with procurement experience. It's that the people with experience often have the wrong experience—skills honed for a world that's rapidly disappearing.

The procurement professional who built their career on aggressive negotiation and supplier squeezing struggles when the job requires collaboration and mutual value creation. The analyst who can build beautiful spend reports can't necessarily tell you what they mean or persuade anyone to act on them.

Meanwhile, the skills we desperately need—strategic relationship management, data storytelling, change leadership, risk judgment—often exist outside traditional procurement career paths. We're competing with consulting, strategy, and commercial roles for the same talent, and we're not always winning.

The result is a widening gap between what organisations need and what the available talent pool can deliver. We're asking people to do jobs they weren't trained for, using skills they may not naturally possess.

The Data Paradox

Here's an interesting irony. We have more data than ever before—spend analytics, supplier risk scores, market intelligence, performance metrics. But having data and using data effectively are entirely different capabilities.

The technical skills to extract and manipulate data are relatively easy to teach. What's harder is developing the judgment to know which data matters, the communication skills to translate insights into action, and the influence to get stakeholders to change behaviour based on evidence.

We need people who can look at a dashboard showing supplier risk trending upward and immediately understand the business implications, craft a narrative for the operations director, and influence a decision to dual-source before problems materialise. That's not a data skill—it's a business skill that uses data.

Too often, we hire data analysts who can't communicate or communicators who can't analyse. Finding people who do both well is genuinely difficult.

The Relationship Revolution

The shift toward strategic supplier relationships changes what success looks like. When your goal was to squeeze suppliers on price, you needed aggressive negotiators. When your goal is to build partnerships that drive mutual value, you need something closer to diplomats.

Modern supplier relationship management requires empathy—understanding the supplier's business model, their constraints, their opportunities. It requires patience—building trust takes time and isn't achieved through ultimatums. It requires creativity—finding solutions that work for both parties rather than zero-sum wins.

These are fundamentally different personality traits from traditional procurement. The hardball negotiator often struggles to adapt. The relationship builder may have never considered procurement as a career path.

Organisations are increasingly recruiting from customer success, account management, and business development backgrounds—people who understand that relationships are assets to be cultivated, not leverage to be exploited.

The Leadership Challenge

Perhaps the biggest gap is leadership capacity. As procurement becomes more strategic, we need people who can influence at executive level, navigate complex stakeholder landscapes, and drive organisational change.

These are senior leadership skills that many procurement functions haven't historically developed. The career path was specialist and technical—you got better at procurement, not at leadership. Now we need people who can do both, and the development pipeline is thin.

CPOs increasingly come from outside procurement—former consultants, general managers, operations leaders who bring strategic capability and learn procurement specifics. This can work well, but it also reveals how weak internal development has been.

What Organisations Are Doing

Successful organisations are addressing the talent gap through multiple approaches. They're widening recruitment—looking beyond traditional procurement backgrounds to find people with the right capabilities regardless of career history. A good relationship manager from a different function may be more valuable than an experienced buyer with outdated skills.

They're investing in development—building training programmes that focus on the emerging capabilities rather than traditional procurement skills. Communication, influence, data storytelling, strategic thinking. The technical procurement knowledge can be layered on top.

They're redesigning roles—separating transactional work that can be automated or outsourced from strategic work that requires human judgment. This creates more attractive roles that appeal to higher-calibre candidates.

They're partnering with academia—working with universities to shape procurement curricula toward future requirements rather than historical practice. The graduates entering the profession should be equipped for the jobs that will exist, not the jobs that are disappearing.

The Human Advantage

There's an optimistic reading of this talent challenge. As automation handles the routine, procurement becomes more human—a profession built on relationships, judgment, and influence rather than processes, spreadsheets, and compliance.

For those entering the field, this is exciting. The ceiling is higher. The work is more interesting. The impact is more strategic. Procurement is becoming a genuine leadership function rather than a back-office support activity.

But realising that potential requires honest acknowledgment that the old skills are insufficient and deliberate investment in developing the new ones. The talent gap isn't closing by itself. It requires active intervention—in recruitment, development, and role design.

The organisations that figure this out will have a genuine competitive advantage. They'll attract better people, develop stronger capabilities, and deliver more strategic value. Those that don't will find themselves with teams equipped for yesterday's challenges, struggling to meet tomorrow's demands.