NEPO named SME Apprenticeship Employer of the Year
We’re delighted to congratulate our partners at NEPO, who have been named SME Apprenticeship Employer of the Year at the North East Regional Apprenticeship and Skills Awards 2026.
The award recognises the Regional Procurement Apprenticeship Programme, which NEPO launched in 2024 with the 12 North East local authorities and which we’re proud to deliver as training partner.
Growing the region’s procurement talent
The programme set out with a clear goal: to develop the next generation of public sector procurement professionals in the North East. Two years on, that goal is being realised. Apprentices and up-skillers are now completing the programme and taking the next steps in their careers, bringing new skills and confidence back to procurement teams across the region.
Alongside technical training delivered across two regional centres, learners take part in employability and professional skills workshops designed to help them build networks and progress. The results have been outstanding, including a 94% first-time pass rate in CIPS exams, the highest performance in England among comparable training providers.
A recurring pattern has emerged across businesses of all sizes. Organisations have heavily invested in visibility platforms, risk dashboards, and consultants producing supplier mapping exercises. These are genuinely useful tools.
However, the person tasked with looking at the amber warning on that dashboard and deciding its impact on the production schedule is often someone who fell into supply chain by chance. They learned the job by shadowing a colleague and have never received formal training in inventory theory, forecasting, or supplier negotiation.
This is not a criticism of the workforce. Some of the sharpest operational instincts belong to professionals with no formal qualifications. But instinct built in a stable market is a poor guide for navigating an unstable one.
The heuristics that worked when lead times were predictable—ordering to a fixed reorder point, trusting the supplier’s ETA, keeping stock lean to reduce waste—are actively dangerous today. A planner working from outdated assumptions will make confident decisions that happen to be entirely wrong.
Gartner recently noted that 72% of supply chain leaders revisit their final network investment decisions. Consider what that means downstream. If the strategic plan at the top keeps shifting, the people executing it need enough foundational understanding to adapt, not just the process knowledge to follow static instructions.
This award belongs to our learners
As NEPO rightly put it, the apprentices are the people who power procurement, and this award is theirs. Their commitment, curiosity and hard work have made the programme what it is, and it has been a privilege to support them every step of the way.
We’d also like to thank NEPO for their leadership and partnership, and the 12 local authorities for their continued investment in their people.
On to the national finals
NEPO now goes forward to the national finals in London on 25th November. We’ll be cheering them on, and we wish every finalist the very best of luck.
