If you asked 40 or so procurement Masters students whether a company’s attitude to “procurement with purpose” would influence them when it came to looking for a job, what do you think they would say?
Last week, I ventured on Eurostar under La Manche on a 24 hour trip to deliver a guest lecture at the Skema business school in Lille. I was talking about Procurement with Purpose, with a focus on some of the dilemmas and difficult issues faced by procurement professionals in this area. Skema is rising up the business school rankings generally, with sites in Lille, Paris and near Cannes, as well as international associations in several continents, including links with MIT. The Lille facility is modern and well equipped – it is within the huge EuraLille development, very central, 5 minutes from both the Eurostar terminal and the main internal Lille station, and next door to the Westfield shopping centre!
Thorsten Makowski, who leads the Supply Chain and Procurement faculty, aims to make Skema a top 3 European business school in that area and they are well on the way to that, with around 80 students a year on the Masters course. Based on my 90 minutes with about half of them, it is a smart, lively and diverse group in terms of age and nationality – about 50:50 male / female but students ranging from early twenties to 40-ish, and many different countries represented.
So, back to that question. Given the demographic, I was surprised that only a handful (literally) responded to my question and said yes, a firm’s attitude to sustainability would influence their job-seeking decisions. Thinking about that later, I reckoned there were three potential explanations for that.
1. Maybe the students didn’t really understand what I was asking – English was a second language for most. But they didn’t appear to struggle with the session generally.
2. Perhaps they were just a pretty hard-headed, economically focused group. I guess many of them are self-funding a full-time Masters programme, so maybe they feel that economic considerations will take priority when it comes to their future careers.
3. But to be hopeful and positive… I wonder whether “sustainability” is becoming something that younger business people just expect to be present, acknowledged and acted upon in pretty much every firm? So the students are working on the assumption that any organisation they interview with will be taking the right sort of sustainability actions that they would expect to see.
Obviously, for the sake of the planet, I do hope it is the third factor, although I’m sure the second point came into play for at least a few of the students. But sustainability is well embedded into the syllabus at Skema, so there seemed no shortage of understanding of the key issues. So perhaps we are seeing a situation where this is becoming the norm in the students’ minds and they simply expect organisations to behave in a certain manner.
It does raise some interesting issues about our individual choice of employer though. Clearly, I’m most unlikely to take a full time job again, but if I did, I would be happy to work for an oil firm that I felt was genuinely moving at a rapid (but manageable) rate towards renewables. I would work for a defence firm like Rolls Royce, or an alcoholic drinks firm. I would not want to work in the tobacco industry, or for a gambling firm. But I recognise that these are sometimes difficult personal choices. I worked in the chocolate industry, for a huge bank, and for what was then the government’s Department of Social Security – some people might have ethical issues with any or all of those!
We certainly hear that more younger people are looking to do work where they feel they are contributing to the planet and to humanity in a positive manner. But I wonder if there is real evidence of this. Are some of those more dubious firms or industries struggling to attract recruits? Or does another 10K on the salary take precedence over moral and ethical concerns? I wonder…