Despite the economic cool down, procurement jobs are still white hot. Whether you're a longtime veteran of the purchasing trenches or a greenhorn straight out of school, if you've got procurement skills, chances are someone is looking to hire you.

No matter if you're in direct or indirect procurement, employers are looking for professionals who are more flexible and technologically versed than ever, says Shelley Stewart, senior vice president of operational excellence and CPO at Tyco in Princeton, N.J. "There are some niche skills in demand depending on the industry, but there are some skills that I think everybody needs," Stewart tells Purchasing. "For example, at Tyco we want all procurement people to have e-procurement skills, use e-tools, and be able to quickly adapt and learn those skills."

Tonia Deal, president of Tonia Deal Consultants, a Hudson, Ohio-based supply chain recruiting firm, says the most successful (and marketable) procurement staffers have the most diverse skill sets. These employees don't spend their entire careers in one silo or role, she says, but rather they have strong cross-functional knowledge.

"Companies aren't looking for a commodity manager that's going to manage only $500 million in steel, even though the title may be commodity manager," Deal says. "Companies want procurement employees that have a diverse background, can be strategic, can work on both supplier-development and cost-saving issues, and can understand total cost."

Many companies, she says, don't have the resources to allow procurement to focus only on buying one commodity and nothing else, so sourcing professionals need to know how to step in and cover multiple roles. Only the largest, most centralized companies might have enough people on hand to help cover issues such as supplier development, quality engineering and target cost analysis. Most other people, says Deal, need to know these skills for themselves.

Even as companies are hit by the economic slowdown, Deal says her phone has been ringing off the hook from employers looking for procurement staffers because more and more corporations realize a healthy procurement center is a major asset. Commodity managers, inventory managers and materials forecasters are all extremely desirable employees right now, says Deal.

"These are areas that we really didn't consider hot even five years ago," Deal adds. "As of the last few years, the overall supply chain focus has become vastly known as a huge interest for organizations."

In the past decade, many companies have worked hard at strengthening the procurement and supply chain basics in their organizations—low-cost country sourcing, contract negotiation, supply base management—so they're no longer looking for staff to come on board to learn these skills. Rather, they assume that new-hires already possess these skills and can help the company move into new areas.

"Whether it is an individual purchasing manager managing a commodity or their own business sector or a staff, they have to be forward-thinking, they have to have a vision and they have to be strategic in nature and have to understand the other parts of the organization," says Deal.

The demand for direct materials buyers varies from industry to industry, but indirect procurement skills are in high demand today as more companies realize the benefit of managing those untapped spend areas. And those indirect procurement skills are more easily transferable from one company or industry to another than direct materials skills are.

"Indirect has really taken off as companies recognize that there is significant opportunity in the uncharted areas, such as benefits, legal and HR," says Stewart. "There's a different set of skills so you have to find people that have dealt with the benefits or legal areas before."

Stewart adds that IT procurement is another area where buyers with the right specialization can be hard to find but are worth finding. Though the knowledge for IT or HR procurement is quite specialized, every industry needs employees with expertise in these areas.

These specialized indirect buying areas are where a hybrid background of procurement and another field can be very useful. A marketer moving into procurement to source marketing has an obvious advantage in that field, just as an IT buyer with a professional IT background is an asset. "[An employee from the IT industry] would actually know how the product works," says Stewart. "If you're a buyer, you might not know what the ultimate application is of what you're buying."

The same thinking applies to some extent on the direct materials sourcing side, too. Manufacturing companies, for example, are often on the lookout for buyers with an engineering background. "Not everyone has to have [an engineering background], but there are highly technical specialized materials that we buy—for example castings and forgings—and there's lots of technology associated with how you build them that impacts the materials forecasting strategy," says Stewart. "A technology background can help you better understand those issues as a buyer."

When it comes to seeing the long-term potential of a procurement hire, Stewart says a lot can hinge on a hiring manager's imagination: "sometimes you have to take risks on people. If they have the general set of skills but not the specific commodity knowledge—they've been in the field long enough and they're a smart person—I think you can help them get where they need to go but you have to be able to identify their intellectual horsepower."

Job candidates who have been working in one area of procurement for 15 years, for example, might be stuck in the industry they're in without an easy way to change to something new. Deal says this has happened especially with buyers in the automotive industry—many of the procurement organizations had the best employees in the field but kept them highly siloed. Now that the U.S. automotive industry is seeing a slowdown, these very specialized buyers are having a hard time transitioning to other industries.

Deal says companies want experienced buyers, but not ones that are strictly hierarchical. "Whether the position is at the buyer level, commodity manager or CPO, my clients are looking for individuals that have been in the trenches because they know these candidates are going to succeed—the ones that haven't, that have more of a hierarchy standard, are going to have a much more difficult time in the current environment." Buyers can no longer be satisfied just knowing what goes on in the warehouses, they have to have a bigger, broader vision of where a company is headed overall and know how to fit that into their daily work, adds Deal.

Employees with only a few years under their belt or even straight out of school are at a disadvantage against their more experienced peers, but that's not to say there aren't opportunities for them. In fact, new MBA graduates are often on the fast-track to programs where companies can get young employees experience and training as fast as possible.

Deal warns that having an MBA or a supply chain management degree is not a meal ticket to success, while Stewart emphasizes that supply chain management and MBA programs, as useful as they are, tend to provide a more general education rather than in-depth specialization, which is often needed in the workforce.

"When they start getting into the workforce, a new-hire needs to assess specific areas where they have interest and make sure the companies that employ them give them a chance," Stewart says. Logistics and transportation is one area he cites, though he also believes rotational training programs that give graduates a variety of experiences to sample over a few years can be hugely beneficial as well.

"With MBAs from supply chain management programs, we sometimes start them at the corporate office and they get opportunities to work on projects across the whole company and pick up skills on project management," says Stewart. Other times these graduates are assigned commodity managers as mentors and from that relationship are able to learn specific commodity-related skills so they can be placed directly into a new job right away.

The advantage to hiring new graduates, Stewart says, is they can be brought up in the company's culture. "Fresh graduates aren't burned out from manufacturing, they don't have set standards, so if the hiring manager is looking for someone that is capable of doing the job but wants to also mold this person, obviously the MBAs and supply chain degrees are a good choice."

For all the emphasis on globalizing economies, both Deal and Stewart agree that language skills—like speaking a dialect of Chinese—are an asset but are still by no means a requirement for hiring. Employees can get placement in procurement jobs in China without any Chinese language experience up-front, though it helps, of course. "It's not really about language. It's more of an attitude and understanding of the culture," says Deal.

But above all, when it comes to finding the next opportunity in procurement: "You can't get stale," Stewart says. "You constantly have to avail yourself of training and new technologies."