Experience You’ll Need to Enter this Role

The experience you’ll need to become a purchasing manager depends on your level of education. Without formal education, you typically need at least 5 years of experience in roles of progressive responsibility within a procurement, inventory management or supply chain management environment.

For example, you could start your career in an entry-level job in purchasing (also known as procurement), inventory management or supply chain management. If you show initiative, accountability and competence in your role, you could gradually move into roles of progressive responsibility, including purchasing manager.

If you have an undergraduate or graduate degree in management or a closely related field, the work experience you’d need could be greatly decreased, as your education may provide you with the knowledge base and competencies that you need to effectively perform management duties in a purchasing department.

Success Tip: It is really hard to step into senior purchasing roles by continually changing jobs. It is much easier to do it by gaining the experience where you are, even if it is only limited experience, and then gradually moving onto roles of progressive responsibility. 

Skills Needed to Be Successful

In order to become an effective worker in this field, you need to possess and/or develop certain skills, including

• The ability to lead and motivate teams of employees

• Experience in training developing staff

• The ability to work within budgetary constraints

• Excellent negotiation skills and the ability to persuade others

• The ability to ensure employees are performing their job duties effectively

• The ability to effectively evaluate suppliers and choose those with the best combination of price and quality

• Intermediate to expert-level competency in MS Office suite

• You can effectively set priorities, while taking into account short and long-term needs of the business

• You can make sound decisions based on established requirements, procedures and practices

Purchasing Manager: General Job Description

As a purchasing manager, you would be responsible for planning and directing the activities of purchasing staff and related workers, who are involved in purchasing materials, products and services for an organization.

You would ultimately be responsible for ensuring that the goods and services they purchase, are of the proper quantity, quality and price as required by your organization.

General Job Duties

Although the specific duties you would perform would vary from job to job, you could expect to perform duties similar to the following:

• Preparing bid awards to be approved by the Board of Directors

• Maintaining records of goods ordered and received

• Administering online purchasing systems

• Recruiting, hiring, training, supervising and supporting purchasing staff

• Locating vendors of materials, equipment or supplies, and interviewing them to determine product availability and terms of sales

• Resolving grievances pertaining to vendor contracts

• Overseeing the preparation of purchase orders and requisition requests

• Ensuring purchase orders are compliant with company policies and procedures