Dear colleagues,
I am coming to you because I am currently feeling a bit lost and I would appreciate it if someone could chip in with some career advice.
I am a Senior Buyer with 10+ years of experience as a retail buyer (last managing a product portfolio worth 300 million EUR a year). 2 years ago I pivoted into indirect procurement (Facility Management) (FM) at another big corporation.
So far I am really enjoying indirect procurement - I am by nature a very analytical person, so I enjoy the complexity of it all. As a next step, I would like to do a lateral move and get involved in IT Procurement (or just take on a more generalist indirect role, which will have IT exposure anyway). I am very interested in this area and generally think it's more strategic and prevalent than FM-Procurement. I believe that doing the above will make me a well-balanced professional and give me a good base from which to grow upward, with wide exposure in terms of categories and styles of procurement.
Now, on to my actual question. I have the creeping suspicion / lingering fear that in some organisations, indirect procurement might be seen as less strategic than direct procurement, as impact is harder to measure and it's not as readily apparent on the bottom line as with direct procurement.
Therefore, I wonder if instead of doing yet another lateral move, I wouldn't be better off simply going back to direct procurement and doing a vertical move by taking on some sort of Category Manager / Procurement Manager role, perhaps with staff responsibility. Truthfully, this is not where my heart is right now (as I mentioned, I am really enjoying indirects), but I have recently made some bad experiences with my current employer that have made me feel like indirects is not that mission critical and which has left me questioning things.
What is your opinion, reddit? Do you see indirect procurement (especially IT) as an attractive growth path? Any input will be greatly appreciated.
Edit: I want to thank everyone for taking time out of your days to respond. In the end, I think I am going to skip IT Procurement for now and go down the path of people management. At 36, I am done being an individual contributor and hopefully I'll be able to get more exposure to indirect categories through growth and the wider scope this entails.