Leadership Development & Learning Category Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Leadership Development & Learning market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Development and Training market. Value-based pricing is rapidly finding favors from buyers as the pricing model of choice for L&D category. This model sets the contract price based on quality and outcome of the training and therefore encourages providers to design more effective training modules.

Buyers that have multiple locations under management are increasingly opting for a single supplier who can deliver L&D services in a consistent manner across locations. Often global L&D suppliers are preferred in such cases.

Demand is increasing for self-learning tools that offer flexible course durations as per an employee's convenience and schedule.

As a result, category managers need to closely monitor the Leadership Development & Learning procurement trends and identify changes required in their procurement environment for the category.

It has become imperative for category managers to remain as agile as possible in terms of their procurement practices. However, it is not always easy to quickly spot and implement alternative practices in a category like Leadership Development & Learning. To help quick decision making, this report advises on several procurement best practices that have worked well for category managers.

For example, Blended learning solutions are a mix of instructor-led learning and web-based learning. These solutions aid buyers to reduce training implementation costs and enhance the effectiveness of training. Hence, buyers must collaborate with service providers that offer blended training solutions.

Category managers should evaluate the RFQ's from service providers against the industry benchmarks as this helps buyers to gain a better understanding of the market prices and save costs.

Buyers can collaborate with their suppliers based on a reward-sharing basis. This can be done by providing special recognition to them at the annual meetings of buyers for high performance or mentioning their brand name on own websites.

Leadership Development & Learning procurement managers also need to proactively identify and mitigate potential risks that can arise in the supply chain or contracts for Leadership Development & Learning procurement. Some examples include: