I recent wrote a post called Buy Your Way Around The World in which I talked about travel opportunities in the Purchasing profession.
The title of this post, Buy Your Way Around Your Interests, is in a similar vein of exploring the career possibilities within the Sourcing field. There is literally a world of opportunity out there. Not only are Purchasing skills transferable to other professions, but Purchasing jobs exist in every industry imaginable.
If you like Purchasing in general, but not your current job or the current industry in which you work, don't be afraid to find an area that interests you.
I just did a quick search on Monster with three keywords we use in this blog all the time: Sourcing, Procurement, and Purchasing. Each word resulted in matches of "more than 1,000."
You can go through those yourself there or at any number of local or national career sites. Just to give you an idea, this is a list of some of the industries in which Buyers I know personally have worked at one time or another in a Purchasing capacity. (Remember, within these industries, they were involved with various commodities throughout their careers.)
- Financial Services
- Retail/Catalog Clothing
- Retail/Catalog Pet Supplies
- Automotive Manufacturing
- Electronics Manufacturing
- Movie Distribution
- Pharmaceuticals
- Footwear Manufacturing
- Public Service
- Retail Food
- Computer Software
- Computer Hardware
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