From my apprenticeship to the world of procurement

Blog
31 Jan 2020

My first ever interview was here at YPO and I was offered the apprenticeship a few weeks later. I started my career in the HR department. Throughout my 18 months with the HR team, I learnt vital skills that have helped me in my career. I also learnt the inner workings of a business and how HR is an integral part of the day-to-day running of the workplace.

Becoming a procurement professional

In April 2019, I secured a position within the Procurement Services department with the HR Services team. I began to learn about the world of procurement. I had gone from recruiting apprentices to managing the administration of the apprenticeship framework.

Being a complete beginner in procurement, I had a lot to learn. My main focus in this role is the apprenticeships framework. During my first six months in the role, we had two tender deadlines with over 100 bids in each. This meant I learnt the full procurement process of the apprenticeships framework from end-to-end and worked on every aspect of this process.

The evaluation of the tender responses has helped me understand the framework in a lot more depth. Each response is evaluated on quality and price. The quality aspect is evaluated on the responses provided to the questions in the invitation to tender (ITT) document.

These questions allow providers to explain their experience and ability in delivering apprenticeships. As a result of these evaluations, we have accepted over 30 new providers onto the framework.

Learning to fulfil customers needs

Some of the new providers that we have added to the framework have bid as a result of our research and contact on behalf of our customers. If there are providers that our customers have worked with in the past or would like to work with, we will do our best to get them registered on the framework so that customers can use them.

We have contacted numerous suppliers in the North West region on behalf of our customers in that area in order to ensure that we have the coverage that our customers need and the quality of delivery they deserve. As a result of this, we have seen an increase in the usage of the framework in this region.

Conducting research and finding new providers to help our customers get the best possible result is highly rewarding, and I look forward to continuing to do this work for our customers.

Learning a completely new role has been very interesting, and I have enjoyed the challenge. I never knew that there was so much depth into the procurement of a framework and how long it takes from end-to-end.