SPEAKER_00: 0:13

Hello and welcome to Let's Talk Procurement, the only show you need to master the art of procurement. Let's go. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Let's Talk Procurement Show. It's the only show you need to ever, ever learn about procurement. Today, with me as always is the man with a plan, the man who is about to transform his whole entire life by making bad decisions. It's uh it's Luke 10. How are you, my friend?

SPEAKER_01: 0:46

Yeah, I'm good. I I'm good for now. Um, but as you say, bad decisions inbound. Um I have already made one bad decision, and I'm surprised you've not actually picked it up already. Um because we have been chatting for 10-15 minutes before. Please don't try and guess because that'll just make me question everything about me. Uh it's no, I've let my I've let my beard grow out a bit. It's a bit thicker than normal. No, I like it. I don't I feel like I look a bit my face just looks a bit dirty instead of chiseled jawline and stubble as I usually have. Um it's uh it's grown out a little bit.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29

I quite like it. It it makes me feel less like I'm talking to an infant and more like a you know a friend and colleague. So I feel a little bit less noncy. So I'm glad you've got the beard. It also kind of makes up for the the top part. Brilliant? Yeah. The kind of Lego hair that you have. I think I think the beard much better. Um but no, I thought it was the glasses that you made a bad decision on. So apologies for that. That's clearly a bad guess.

SPEAKER_01: 1:59

Yeah, that is a bad guess. Um just contemplating my choices now. I know you hate them anyway, it's fine.

SPEAKER_00: 2:07

I don't actually hate them, I just love that they're like a particular well, I've said it before in previous episodes, right? They're basically if you Google Jeffrey Darmer, ignore whatever he's done um and just look at his glasses. That's what Luke 10's wearing to work every day.

SPEAKER_01: 2:21

It's just it's not true though. It's not true. But anyway, I'm not gonna buy it. Alright, cheers, Jeff.

SPEAKER_00: 2:31

Um, so what's what's what's going on then? What's what's today's topic all about? Or should we start with the the notice board?

SPEAKER_01: 2:39

Yeah, well, I suppose the notice board sort of is the the episode, isn't it? Um we received on email from our mate Kareem. Uh Kareem has previously emailed us and he's emailed us again uh on the email address two luke's onesip at gmail.com. That's the number two, Luke's plural, the number one, cIP at gmail.com.

SPEAKER_00: 3:06

Can I ask a question? Is Kareem is Kareem the one who asked us like two days before we went into an exam for advice?

SPEAKER_01: 3:13

No, no. Well who was that? That was uh that was our other our other mate, uh Nick, I believe. He um yeah, he emailed us about a partnership with Daniel Doe.

SPEAKER_00: 3:28

Um, stay tuned, by the way. Because there is progress on that front. Uh we are we are we have an active talks with Double D for uh maybe an episode, maybe maybe a link up, maybe a collab. So uh watch this space.

SPEAKER_01: 3:47

Yeah, it's kind of like when uh when you get like an all-star team. It's like the all the people in the procurement field that are reputable and you know have growth inbound, they'll be there.

SPEAKER_00: 4:04

Well yeah, and it's it's I mean we've spoken to him already, haven't we? And he's he's a lovely rope to be fair. I think he's far more prepared and and versatile than we are, so we'll we'll yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 4:15

We did a little s slight planning at uh planning meeting, didn't we? Yeah, and he was just asking us loads of questions that clearly showed he was loads more prepared than than we would be. Even in in our new season three.

SPEAKER_00: 4:30

Yeah, and he thinks we plan, so watch that space.

SPEAKER_01: 4:37

So going back to uh short story long, going back to our our dear friend Kareem, um who's got in touch on our email, he has said, Hi guys, can you please provide tips to recover from failing OR or CR exams? For I have a buddy who failed level four exams more than five times. Why should you not give up? How can you use, and there's a secondary question, how can you use exam reports for a retake? Thank you, Kareem.

SPEAKER_00: 5:11

There's a couple of elements to this, isn't there?

SPEAKER_01: 5:14

So Kareem, I just want to say first of all, um I'm sorry you uh I mean I mean your friend failed. Uh it's uh it's a tough it's a tough situation. Zips is tough, as much as Luke One will say it's not tough. Um it is hard, especially when you're balancing you're balancing a job and you're balancing personal life, social life, and studying as well at the same time. That can be difficult. So I would say the first step for me, the first tip I would I would say is to not be too hard on yourself. Don't uh you know, some bad things have happened, but that doesn't define you as a person, right? You're more than just a number on a piece of paper. Would you agree?

SPEAKER_00: 6:03

Not really. No, no, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Uh yeah, I do. I'm just I'm just thinking about the questions. There's a couple of elements to that question, isn't there? And we'll break it down. I think first of all, Kareem, it's it's the first step is admitting, okay. So if if your friend um is also called Kareem, um and when you look in the mirror, you see your friend, then I think you just need to admit it, okay? And just just kind of say, look, hold your hands up, you've had a rough ride of it, but you believe in yourself, you know, look in that mirror and say, Ream, you're putting the ream in Kareem, right? And you're just gonna be back and you're gonna do a smashing job of it. Okay, so don't none of this let's let's pass it off to a mate. Um, let's just accept defeat and we'll come back and win the war. Okay, so that's the that's the kind of first first step. Second, is it the same exam that's been failed five times over, or do you think it's it's different ones?

SPEAKER_01: 7:02

Uh I I don't know. He doesn't he doesn't say that on the email. He just says failed level four exams more than five times. He says exams plural, so maybe it's different exams.

SPEAKER_00: 7:18

What I mean if it's level four and level four is the entry point for you or your friend, then it does take some getting used to in terms of the format of both of the exams and understanding them. And for me, the worst bit is the best bit, which is practice, and I know that sounds ridiculous, right? But you can write an answer to a pretend exam at home in your own time, however, that's nothing compared to writing that in the same time limit that you would have in the exam. Um, because that's where the pressure comes in, especially in the uh CR. Is it CR? CR the SA one? Right and one, yeah. Yeah, so in the essay ones, obviously the time frame is is definitely pushy. Agreed for me, nail the format of the essay responses and give yourself like strict ass timelines. Like I'm talking like like stricter than nuns in a covenant, right? What you what you want to do is you want to um say, look, I'm gonna have half an hour to write each essay and I'm gonna have 10 minutes to plan at the start. So in 10 minutes at the start, open up your notepad, your virtual notepad, jot down everything that you've either stored in your brain or or you you think's gonna be useful for the exam, you know, references, case studies, anything like that that will just jog your memory. Go through the questions, start a little high-level planning in those 10-15 minutes, just you know, jot a few bullet points for each question that you want to address, then just dive into it and do half an hour, 40 minutes in each question, and whatever time frame you've set for yourself, stop. Right? I know it sounds really weird, but if you've got three quarters of the way through, stop, move on to the next one. Like you've given yourself a far better chance by covering all four essay questions than smashing the first one or two in detail.

SPEAKER_01: 9:09

Was it was it you that was telling me about someone in their SIP school who always refused to do the fourth question?

SPEAKER_00: 9:21

Yeah, we had the one one guy who refused to learn the fourth chapter of the book. He said that was always too much, so he would do he would do three exam questions and just leave the fourth completely. Um I d I don't know if he obtained his sips yet or not, but I would advise against that personally. I think I think you know you you can you can get away with covering all four to a lesser extent. It's better than doing two two to a better extent in my opinion. Um the can the kind of feedback reports that you get will highlight areas uh that you need to improve on. Absolutely, so you alluded to that. Now, we've kind of gone through Luke Ten's feedback on one of the episodes, and we can do another episode in a bit more detail. Um granted that's not in exam conditions, but what it does do is it does they do point out kind of flaws in the structure of your response and your writing. So you might find that they say you're not giving enough case studies as an example, or you're not giving real life examples where you have put that practice into that theory into practice. Or they might say uh you used the model Michael's Michael Porter's five forces, but you didn't necessarily uh show that you knew all five of the forces, you referenced three of the forces. It could be something like that, but they they point to you and it will either be the theory, you've missed something in the case study, um or or your own examples aren't really appropriate. It's normally one of those three.

SPEAKER_01: 11:03

So I guess to kind of summarise that point, you should be looking out for key themes. If you've if you failed more than five times and you've got five um, you know, those are five CR exams, you've got a you've got a decent sample to compare all of them and say, look, this is saying in every one, it gets mentioned something about the reference to the question, or you know, you you're not you're not referencing two models enough or something like that. As you say, Luke one. So yeah, look for the look for the themes in the uh in the exam reports.

SPEAKER_00: 11:41

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, to be honest, this will be a first, but if you want to s if your friend wants to send them in to us, we would be more than happy to have a look and give you some constructive feedback. You know, we might we might take the piss a little bit but in a light-hearted way, um, but we will give you genuine kind of feedback. And um we do have uh episodes coming up where we have a SIPS tutor who will give some insights on on exams and and kind of tips as well, so that'll be really useful.

SPEAKER_01: 12:07

Yeah, I think you can you can send it into us, we will give some honest feedback and probably some helpful feedback, but it will be uh it will it won't be for free, it will be for a chargeable cost. That chargeable cost will be no wait for it, that chargeable cost will be us publishing it as an episode.

SPEAKER_00: 12:29

Okay, yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Okay. Well, we're not gonna publish the full report, but we'll read elements of it, right?

SPEAKER_01: 12:34

Yeah, we'll we'll we'll keep it uh we'll keep it anonymized, but we will talk about it.

SPEAKER_00: 12:42

I think and I'm I'm I'm sticking on the written written exams for now. I think reading the question and understanding what it is asking, typically, if it's out of 25 marks, I think they they they normally are where you where you would probably have an intro, five key points, and then I always did a quick summary, like a literally just a brief summary of the above, um, just to close it out. But if I was running out of time, I'd just skip that bit. Um so if it if it's not a time issue, then it's a it's a theoretical or knowledge gap, right? So you need to understand what what knowledge it is that that you're missing out on, and to kind of give you some confidence and reassurance, I think there is a lot of repetition in sips from four through to through to six. So spending a bit more time battling with the likes of steeple or portus 5 forces or you know financial um measurements, things like that, spending the time now to learn it will pay off throughout the rest of your SIP journey. So it's not lost time or or kind of experiences.

SPEAKER_01: 13:56

Yeah, and then moving on to the constructive response exams, CR, those are the multiple choice ones for those who like to uh talk in layman's terms. Um we do actually have tips for that, and we do have I think we do have an affiliate link for for you to use. We may have sorted it out by the time this episode goes live. I'm looking at a bit looking at Mr. Luke One.

SPEAKER_00: 14:27

Uh however I want to launch it with the collab episode, to be fair, but it would get it out before. So thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 14:34

So what that basically is, is uh let's say we'll have we'll have sorted the link out by then and it'll be in the in the description. So for those who haven't listened to other episodes, uh Daniel Du Udemy exams are very good. I did them throughout my level four back when I was doing uh multiple choice exams back in the day. And also Nick, who we had on for an episode, he used them and he uh on average scored over 90% in the multiple choice exam. So they are very good. They're very similar to the actual SIPS exams. Um and you might think that we're just saying this because we've got an affiliate link and we get a little kickback. However, it is documented in one episode that we said before we were best mates with Danny Doe. We even promoted it then. So there you go. What more do you want?

SPEAKER_00: 15:26

Yeah, and I think again, practice, right? The thing for me was always uh normally the four four options, two of them are the most ridiculous things you've ever seen and just don't make sense to the question. And then you've got two that uh it could potentially be. Um normally normally go with whatever you you kind of think uh is the right answer. Yeah, you're gonna and you tend to have a lot of time in those exams relative to the amount of questions, so you've probably got enough time to go through flag any ones that you're not sure of and come back to them. And quite often there's clues, not deliberately, but there's clues in other questions as to what might be the answer for your question. So you get some overlap, and the question another question might be the answer to a to a previous question, if that makes any sense.

SPEAKER_01: 16:13

Because my my understanding of it is that it's a question bank. So they will pull out right, they don't create a test and then give you that test. It's just a randomized bank of questions that just get selected for that exam. So yeah, as as Luke once says, you might have one question that says, What model contains five forces?

unknown: 16:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 16:35

It will have a list of five options of four options. Then you go to another question and say, Uh, you know, what are the four things on Porter's Five Forces model? Yeah. So look out for that.

SPEAKER_00: 16:48

It's actually quite amazing how many times that happens as well.

SPEAKER_01: 16:51

Um Yeah. There there is another thing, uh, another tip, which I would say is it sounds stupid and everyone said it, but read the question because sometimes it will say which of these is false, or sometimes the answer will come up as it will give you a statement, uh four statements A, B, C, and D, and then it will ask you, is it A and B, is it C and D, is it DNA? And you've got a pick from that perspective as well.

SPEAKER_00: 17:22

That's that's I mean that that applies to both types of exams, is read the question, because if you missed the question or misinterpret the question, you're going off down a rabbit hole and you don't stand a fight and chance.

SPEAKER_01: 17:33

Yeah. Would you would you recommend any sort of uh meditation or some sort of calm b breathwork type exercises before the exams to get yourself in the zone?

SPEAKER_00: 17:45

Um it depends what type of person you are. I mean, do you some people get really worked up before exams, and if that's the case, then yes, absolutely. Um just try and have a try and have try and do the exam on your terms, right? So if if you're doing it online and you want to do it from home, that's fine, but make sure it's it's suiting you and you feel like you're in an exam setting and you're you're ready to smash it. Um for me, I couldn't really do the essay exams at home, I just didn't feel comfortable doing it. So I went into the exam centres and it was just a lot more like being in an exam, and it helped me focus longer. Um, some of the multiple choice ones just just you know neck a red ball and just go for it. Um other times, yeah, a bit of breath work can do the trick. I think everyone kind of approaches exams slightly differently. Um, but the more you can go in with a level head, the better you kind of stand a chance of passing, really. The other thing is have Kareem or your friend have you had any support? I mean, are you literally just doing it off the back of a textbook? I mean, do you have textbooks? Are you just YouTubeing things? Are you you know, is the only way you're looking at SIPS this podcast? You know, if it is, then I understand why you failed because we're not that great. Um but there are like SIPs have local area communities, there's LinkedIn pages, you know, you can connect with people who are going through SIPS level four exams, you can share ideas, you can, you know, just just reach, put yourself out there and find people in in similar positions as well. Um, because there's lots of students out there.

SPEAKER_01: 19:26

I would I would definitely agree, and I'm in the background, I'm trying to find um another recommendation which we aren't getting paid for. Uh yes, found it. So right. So another recommendation which we aren't getting paid for is something on YouTube. I think it's the old syllabus, so obviously be wary of that. It's a woman on YouTube called Procurement Study Buddy. Uh she does she does loads of slides about a lot of things, level four to six. Um and she narrates over the slides, and it's kind of like being in a in a classroom, but you get to pause and rewind and select the topics that you're not feeling comfortable with. I think they're they are very good to watch, but I think you need to do your own, as you say, our other our other recommendations. You need to do your own practice exams, you need to do your own timings. Um but in terms of the theory, this should probably be an earlier stage than that, at the point where you're kind of getting to grips with a theory. Getting to grips with a theory, then that's when you should uh should use it.

SPEAKER_00: 20:43

And I think there's there's certain theories where you just want to take them down in your notebook and just kind of almost just refer back to them where you can, yeah, get to work on them just like having five ports, five forces or steeple or whatever in a in a fairly easy to access notebook will do you good at any given point in your procurement career, just as a reminder that it exists and this is why we do it or what we're doing. And and the more so when you get to the financial stuff like acid ratio and all that good fun stuff.

SPEAKER_01: 21:16

Yeah, you've got to commit some stuff to memory at points, haven't you?

SPEAKER_00: 21:20

Well, if you want to be the best, you've got to learn the best, right?

SPEAKER_01: 21:22

So as our sort of final thing, could we in a future episode, you know, people have said how good our voices are, how ASMR-like we are, could we do some sort of like sleep uh sleep meditation type thing, how people get to sleep the night before the exam?

SPEAKER_00: 21:43

Well, and mix it up with like procurement models in there so we can go through into the brain, yeah. Yeah. Does that sound good? Could you hear that?

unknown: 21:54

Five voices.

SPEAKER_01: 21:57

Uh they don't whisper, they just have a very calming.

SPEAKER_00: 22:01

So like ocean waves. Should we try it? I would put some ocean waves in the background to this.

SPEAKER_01: 22:07

Or warning if you're driving. Turn tune off now. You might fall asleep.

SPEAKER_00: 22:14

The ocean sounds are kicked in. You are ready for this exam. Steeple.

SPEAKER_01: 22:22

You are strong, you are capable. You are prepared and ready. Imagine yourself opening the results and a successful outcome. Unless you're Kareem.

unknown: 22:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 22:48

That's a that's an insight. So if you like the sound for that, we could do a full episode on that. I think maybe, you know, four to five forces and then we can expand on, you know, threat of substitutions. In between the raids crashing on the shore.

SPEAKER_01: 23:02

Did I I think I've said this already, but um I was driving my mum somewhere and she she wanted to listen to the podcast as like some sleep uh some sleep audio while I was driving. And then we put the podcast on, and then she started disagreeing with what you, Luke One, were saying, so it just made her more awake.

SPEAKER_00: 23:24

I I can't lie, I think she started that vendetta way back in season one, and I've I've not really forgiven her since, to be honest. He's not forgiven you either. Yeah, it's that weird hostility. I think I think she's jealous that we've got a relationship, is my honest opinion on that. I feel like she listens to the water. Well, because you're because you're like a mother to me, is that that's it, and you know, I've taken I've taken you in like a mother hen. I've helped I've helped you spread your wings and become become something, you know. Whereas what did you achieve under her wing?

SPEAKER_01: 23:58

Quite a lot, actually.

SPEAKER_00: 24:03

Oh delise, can't wait for you to listen to that. Uh anyway, I'll be over next week for a cup of tea, alright?

SPEAKER_01: 24:09

We hopefully. Alright. Um, yeah, if you want to get in touch, like Kareem, our best mate, has done. Um apologies in advance of you hearing this. Um, but yeah, don't give up. Believe in yourself, and um yeah, all the all good things take time and effort.

SPEAKER_00: 24:30

Yeah, we'll get there. You know, and take us up on the offer of sending in sending in reports or even an exam question that you've drafted, and we'll we'll give it a go. We'll we'll let we'll give you some feedback. Absolutely don't mind that.

SPEAKER_01: 24:43

Maybe we even try to answer it as well. See how we get on.

SPEAKER_00: 24:49

I don't want to expose us. Um I mean, yeah, no, great idea. Great idea.

SPEAKER_01: 24:55

Cool. Right. Uh well, I'll see you in the next one. See you later.