Quickly reviewing Next Level Purchasing’s 2011 Purchasing & Supply Management Career & Skills Report, one statistic jumped out at me — 37.5% of the respondents are from Africa. Considering that the GDP of Africa is only 2 Trillion, give or take a few hundred billion depending upon whether you prefer the IMF, World Bank, or CIA Factbook calculations, or about 3% of global GDP, as compared to the roughly 16 Trillion for North America, 18 Trillion for Asia, and 20 Trillion for Europe, the first question that jumped to my mind was relevancy. (And the fact that Europe only accounted for 6.7% of respondents didn’t help.)

It might be the case that Purchasing managers in developing areas are a lot more interested in surveys since they are trying to establish the importance of their profession, and it might be the case that most of Next Level Purchasing’s students and/or association members are from developing areas since they would be the least likely to have access to local training and eduction options (and Next Level Purchasing’s courses and certification is completely web based), which would account for a strong showing from these areas, but it makes one wonder how relevant the results are to Europe and North America, which are still the dominant locales for international purchasing (even though Asia is rising).

While it likely doesn’t affect the responses to skills, education, and certification related questions, as the top answers to the most important skills response are typical, the expected results from certification trend normally, and people who study for certification generally believe in its importance, it does put some suspicion on the applicability of the average annual cost savings & avoidance results. While I do agree that savings will increase by years of experience, annual hours of training, certification, and degree status, I’m not sure that I would trust the unweighted averages, especially since the average cost savings go from about 800K in Africa to 3.7M in Europe. It would be nice to see the savings and avoidance statistics broken down by continent, or at least weighted by continent, to clearly illustrate the impact of education and training.

Relevancy aside, it is nice to see interest in professional purchasing spreading through Africa and Asia.