by Dr. Robert A. Kemp

In my last article I asked the question, “Should we all have a personal professional development program?  Our answer to that question should be unequivocally and most emphatically “Yes!” I also know that many of us who claim to be professional supply managers do not have or at best have only a rudimentary undocumented personal development program.

Similarly, many companies have no formalized personal development plans for the people responsible for efficiently spending over 50 percent of those companies’ total revenues. Even worse, the training program in many companies is the first program slashed when budgets become a little tight. Benjamin Franklin would have called that “being penny-wise and pound-foolish.” I have even stronger opinions of that type of cost-cutting behavior.

This article gets us started on the process of building and executing our own professional development program. Getting started is probably the most difficult part.

A very wise person once said,  “A good plan is a problem half solved.”  We need a good plan, and good plans always begin with a sound assessment of the current situation. Everyday many of us use benchmarking processes to accurately evaluate the current situation and identify potential opportunities. Similarly, we need benchmarks for our personal professional development. We can begin our mapping process in two steps as shown below. Step one suggests these personal history benchmarks.

Step two of our mapping process is more difficult. It requires us to begin to identify the specific supply management concepts or topics that we will use as benchmarks in our program and the metric or metrics to measure and evaluate progress vis-à-vis each metric. In this process, individuals will have many different programs and it would be easy to give up the process as impossible.

But that is a cop-out. By thinking out of the box and working creatively to solve the problem, we can find the similarities we need to identify and build the benchmark system. First, we need to select and evaluate a list of concepts and idea sources. Here is a list of four great sources for concepts to use. Other lists are available; use them if they fit you and your situation.

Hot topics
Our first source ought to be a list of current hot topics in our field. Professors Larry Giunipero and Robert Handfield identified the top trends in supply management for 2010 (CAPS Study, PET II 2004). Similarly, Professors Giunipero and Handfield identified many skills whose importance will increase in the future for supply management work. These can be used as supply management concepts against which we ought to measure our professional knowledge.

ISM exam guidelines
A second source that can help identify areas to measure is the broad list of topics and tasks in the specifications for the C.P.M. Examination and program provided by the Institute of Supply Management (ISM). You will find similar lists of important topics in other certification programs. Use those that are most applicable to your work.

A third source is the table of contents and spectrum of articles in the Annual Proceedings for the ISM International Conference. A large committee of successful practicing supply managers carefully selected those presentations as current issues for supply management practitioners. Moreover, each article was prepared and presented by one or more experts in our field.

Professional networks
A fourth source of concepts is your professional network and mentors. You can build this list by asking these people what concepts and specific metrics they consider to be important and why.

Benchmark yourself
We know that benchmarking is a sound and practical program for many of our business activities. We can also use benchmarking as a sound tool to identify concepts and metrics for our professional development program.

To keep track of your benchmarks, use a card like this one.

This article appeared in the August/September 2005 issue of MRO Today magazine.  Copyright 2005.