The role of procurement involves obtaining anything the company needs to function – whether it’s raw materials for manufacture, externally-sourced marketing services, or getting more value-for-money contracts in place. Soft skills are at the heart of this profession. Number crunchers may be useful in the back office, but during negotiations with suppliers, you need to possess emotional intelligence as well as numerical ability to strike the best dea...

Shared Services is about standardising processes and putting them in one place (offshore location). There are tangible benefits for doing this and an increasing number of companies are going down this route. Helen Cain - Head of Shared Service at Serco - illustrates the kind of projects that you can expect to undertake as part of your day-to-day role a in Shared Services department.