Boost Your Purchasing or Logistics Career With a Qualification: Why Experience Isn’t Enough Any More

You’ve been working in your current role for a long time – you’ve worked hard, risen through the ranks and you know your industry inside out. So why aren’t you moving any further?

Times have changed, and so have the things employers are looking for. Where previously experience alone might have been enough to get you a job or promotion in logistics, purchasing or supply chain management, these days employers are focusing more and more on professional qualifications such as CIPS (Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply) or CILT (Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport).

If you don’t believe us – check the job listings. Browse through sites like Monster or TotalJobs and you’ll find more and more vacancies requesting that applicants be CIPS or CILT qualified. This is partly due to growing popularity of the courses with employers – if they’ve already invested in training for the rest of their workforce, it would make sense to hire employees who already hold similar qualifications. It’s also down to the recession – jobs are becoming scarcer, so employers are asking for more to differentiate between the hundreds of CV’s they might receive for each vacancy they advertise.

Professional qualifications are a mark of excellence in your chosen area, be it procurement, freight, warehousing or inventory, and are a perfect way to back up your working experience and knowledge with a formal certification. You can choose to study at a number of different levels, so whether you’re at entry level or management level there’ll be something to challenge you. You can also usually tailor the courses to suit you, choosing from a range of different modules to make sure your qualification matches your career ambitions.

Because CIPS and CILT are professional work-based qualifications, you don’t need to have any formal qualifications to take the courses – they’re based around your day-to-day work and experience, so you can start at the level that suits you best without having to worry about your previous education.

Professional qualifications like these are a great way to get an industry-recognised mark of excellence that will really make your CV stand out from the crowd, and really boost your career in supply chain, purchasing or logistics.