Mentoring Category Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Mentoring market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Development and Training market. Integration of the latest technology in learning requires significant investments and therefore procurement costs are expected to rise for learning modules based on advanced technologies. In the long run, buyers could see stable pricing as suppliers recover their technology cost.

Labor cost constitutes a key component of L&D providers' OPEX. Factors such as rise in the cost of living, increase in the local wage policies across geographies, and rise in wages and remuneration packages will propel service providers' OPEX and therefore use of automation and other tools will further increase to offset some of the rise in cost of operations.

Several important sectors of the global economy, such as BFSI, Healthcare and Manufacturing are facing serious shortage of adequately skilled workforce. Companies are trying to fill this gap by re-skilling their existing employees in new skills. Similarly, rapid penetration of new technologies across industries (e.g. big data, AI, blockchain, or even data analytics tools) is necessitating re-skilling of employees so that they understand and leverage these technologies to work more efficiently. These factors have improved the demand outlook for L&D services in developed economies and will soon impact the developing economies as well.

As a result, category managers need to closely monitor the Mentoring 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 Mentoring. To help quick decision making, this report advises on several procurement best practices that have worked well for category managers.

For example, Buyers prefer to streamline their training process at the global level. Therefore, buyers seek services that aid in the centralization of their learning processes through cloud-based platforms. SaaS provides a unified platform for learning where both the instructor and the learner can interact from remote locations and share information. This saves time and cost for buyers.

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.

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