As with any professional field, the appropriate education is often a critical sucess factor. And, as with any professional field that is constantly changing, continual education is often key to continued success. Moreover, although the academics will often tell you this continued education should be delivered by them either through more advanced degrees, specialist degrees, or appropriately designed continuing education courses, the reality is that it is what you learn that is important, not who delivers it. In other words, we are no longer in a world where the medium is the message, we are in a world where the message transcends the medium and we are the message – and the message that we convey is what is important.

This means that professional development courses and certification programs, if appropriately designed and delivered, can be just as effective as academic programs, if not more so – especially if they are tailored to the challenges we address in our daily routines and convey to us the knowledge we need to do our jobs, and do them better.

To this end, I’d like to formally point out that if you are a traditional purchasing manager looking to update your capabilities from those of a twentieth century purchaser to a twenty-first century strategic sourcing professional, you have a professional option through Next Level Purchasing – the first (and only?) organization to offer training, and certification, over the internet at your pace.

Observant readers may remember that I’ve referenced Next Level Purchasing a few times before and wonder why I’m drawing extra attention to them now – and the answer is simple. First of all, until recently, there were very few academic programs with supply chain components, and most of these programs do not have extensive modules on today’s eSourcing enabled strategic sourcing best practices, as most of this technology is quite new. Therefore, this program provides a great way for you to update your skill set very quickly. Secondly, after a great discussion with Charles Dominick, the founder of Next Level Purchasing about current and future course offerings, I’ve decided to review a course or two^* to help you understand the benefit of their unique offering and how you can use their offering to jump start your advancement to a Next Level Purchaser.

^* I may not get to it until after the Supply Chain Directions Summit hosted by eyefortransport in San Francisco at the end of the month.