Wow. In the past week, there has been a flurry of blogging activity between the Purchasing Certification Blog, Sourcing Innovation, Supply Excellence, and Spend Matters on the topic of the BLS report about the growth rate of purchasing jobs.

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Other than yours truly, all of the editors of the aforementioned blogs felt that the BLS’ estimate of purchasing job growth likely being up to 8% was incredibly wrong. Sourcing Innovation even featured a quite passionate post disagreeing with some of the points I’ve made here.

So, my questions to my fellow bloggers are: if the estimated growth is not 8%, what is it? Why? And is the likelihood of another economic recession factored into that estimate?

I’ve read a lot about 8% being the wrong number, but no offering of what the right number is.

And, oh yeah, not only are software and procurement outsourcing factors limiting job growth, but so are the trend of center-led procurement and the heating up of merger and acquisition activity. There’s been lots of buzz about huge companies (Alcoa, for example) perhaps being gobbled up and, when that happens, the purchasing department of the combined company usually has less staff than the sum of the two independent companies.