Skills for the Evolving TPRM Professional

Third party risk management (TPRM) looks very different now than it did 20 years ago. Back then, teams mainly checked procurement and contracts and conducted basic due diligence. Rules were simpler, and oversight was mostly manual. Today, TPRM covers just about every part of the business, including cybersecurity, privacy, resilience, business continuity, AI, fourth-party and supply chain risks, compliance, Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG), and even geopolitics. 

The field has become more specialized, with dedicated professionals, certifications, technology tools, and standardized industry practices. As TPRM evolves, practitioners must continuously learn to ensure their skills remain current. 

This article covers key TPRM skills to consider in today’s environment and shares practical ways to build them through your daily work and ongoing learning. 

Practical Technical Skills and Understanding

Everyone working in TPRM should have a solid grasp of the basics: lifecycle stages, core risk domains, risk tiering, critical third party identification, ongoing monitoring and reassessment, performance oversight, and offboarding. Comfort with these fundamentals is essential for TPRM professionals. 

The next sections outline technical skills and experience that are increasingly vital for both new and seasoned practitioners. 

Understanding AI in a TPRM Context 

By now, most professionals have heard that anyone who does not learn AI will be left behind. For TPRM practitioners, the bar is higher than just knowing how to use a tool. The key capability is understanding how AI is actually being used across your organization and your third party ecosystem, as well as how that use affects existing risk domains such as cybersecurity, privacy, operational resilience, reputation, and governance. 

Organizations vary in AI maturity. Some have formal governance and oversight; while others are still finding out where AI is used across their business and third party services. 

Even when governance structures are still developing, effective third party risk practitioners prioritize understanding AI well enough to ask informed questions, recognize its presence in workflows and products, and identify potential operational, cybersecurity, or compliance concerns before formal processes are established. 

Ways to build capability include: 

• Learn the basics of how AI systems function, including concepts such as large language models, training data, automation, model drift, and generative AI. 

• Focusing on your higher-risk third parties, pick one that markets “AI-powered” capabilities and review its documentation, privacy notice, or security whitepaper. Note where data use, governance, and controls are clearly explained and where information is vague or missing. 

• Ask internal Security, Data, Architecture, or Technology teams to walk through one existing AI use case and its risk review. Identify which of those questions you should also be asking during third party due diligence. 

• Review a current questionnaire, contract template, or assessment process and identify where AI-related questions, disclosures, or governance language should be added or strengthened. 

Spending time on these activities helps you see how AI really works in your company and with third parties. This hands-on experience shows that AI is more than just an abstract idea. 

Seeing Risk Beyond the Questionnaire 

Many third party risks don’t show up in questionnaires or security checks. Instead, they appear as outages, repeated failures, missed promises, poor escalation, unhappy teams, or customer complaints. It’s important to spot risks beyond checklists and understand how vendors work every day. 

Strong TPRM links third party oversight to real operations. This requires knowing where the business relies most on a provider, where workarounds exist, where support issues recur, and where failures cause disruption. These insights often come from conversations, incident reviews, and observing relationships over time. 

Ways to build capability include: 

• Ask a business owner to walk through how they use a key third party during a normal workday, including where they experience the most dependency, delays, or operational pain points. 

• After a third party-related incident or outage, review the event summary and identify where stronger TPRM visibility or earlier questioning may have helped surface concerns sooner. 

• Sit in during operational, service review, or escalation meetings involving key third parties to see how issues are handled in practice versus how they appear in contracts or assessment responses. 

• Review recurring support tickets, performance metrics, or complaint trends tied to critical third parties and look for patterns that may indicate broader operational or governance concerns. 

Strengthening this area helps you spot operational risks early, establish credibility with business stakeholders, and expose hidden gaps that questionnaires may miss. The key is proactively identifying risks and gaps before they impact operations or stakeholder trust. 

Turning Data into Something People Can Use 

Most TPRM teams collect plenty of data, but much of it is hard to use or doesn’t support decision-making. Reports can be overwhelming, dashboards confusing, and important issues can get lost. A key skill is making information clear so the business can focus on what matters. 

You don’t need to be a reporting pro or data-visualization expert, but you do need to organize info so people can see the real risks, know what matters, and focus. The best reports make things clear quickly, not just dump out all the data. 

Ways to build capability include: 

• Review a dashboard or report your team regularly produces and identify what people actually reference during meetings versus what is largely ignored. 

• Take a large third party spreadsheet and reduce it to a short summary focused only on critical third parties, overdue remediation items, or unresolved high-risk issues, then see whether the simpler version improves the discussion. 

• Ask a business stakeholder which third party metrics or reports they actually find useful versus which ones feel confusing or too complicated. 

• Practice summarizing a complicated third party issue in a few plain-language sentences without leaning on acronyms, scoring formulas, or framework terms. 

When you make data easier to understand, people can make better decisions. Clarity helps drive action with confidence. 

Building Contract and Performance Awareness 

No one expects you to be a lawyer, but you do need to know contracts and performance standards well enough to spot when something is missing, unclear, or doesn’t line up. Big risk calls often hinge on service levels, security promises, escalation rules, audit rights, or how you can end a contract, even if you’re not the one negotiating the details. 

Good TPRM means spotting the gap between stakeholder assumptions and contract terms. If you understand service level agreements (SLAs), reporting, and accountability, you give better advice and catch problems before they become disputes. 

Ways to build capability include: 

• Select one important third party agreement and review only the sections tied to SLAs, security obligations, audit rights, incident notification requirements, and termination language, then summarize the key commitments in plain business language. 

• When a third party repeatedly underperforms, compare the operational issues being reported to the contractual requirements and identify where expectations and obligations do not line up. 

• Sit with Procurement, Legal, Vendor Management, or Business teams during a contract review discussion to see which provisions tend to create the most negotiation friction or operational risk. 

• Review a recent third party’s escalation or dispute and identify whether the issue stemmed from poor performance, unclear expectations, weak governance, or contract language that lacked specificity. 

Improved contract and performance awareness empowers you to address gaps early and drive realistic risk conversations.  

Takeaway: Understand contracts to manage operational outcomes. 

Soft skills deserve equal attention 

Technical expertise helps you identify problems and assess risk, but your influence on outcomes hinges equally on how you communicate, negotiate, and collaborate. These interpersonal skills are least likely to be automated, making them necessary for long-term career endurance in this field. 

Telling the Risk Story So People Listen 

Risk management matters only when people understand it clearly enough to make decisions or act. Many TPRM teams provide detailed, accurate assessments, yet leaders leave discussions uncertain about priorities. The ability to explain risk in practical, relevant terms tied to business impact is priceless. 

Effective communication in TPRM is not about sounding technical. It is about making information usable. Stakeholders need to understand the issue, how it could affect the business, the trade-offs, and the action you recommend. That often means simplifying language, cutting unnecessary detail, and focusing on consequences and decisions rather than framework terminology. 

Ways to strengthen this area include: 

• Take a recent assessment or finding and rewrite the summary for a business leader in five short sentences, focusing on impact, exposure, and available options. 

• Before a meeting or escalation discussion, identify the specific decision, approval, or action you need and shape your talking points around that outcome. 

• Review an older risk report or assessment summary and spot where acronyms, scoring language, or technical detail may have made the message harder to understand. 

• Ask a non-TPRM stakeholder to review one of your summaries or presentations and explain back what they believe the risk or concern is, then notice where misunderstandings occur. 

Clear communication makes it much easier to build stakeholder trust, gain support for remediation efforts, and help the business make well-informed decisions. 

Handling Stakeholders, Negotiation, and Conflict 

TPRM is often caught between different pressures. Business teams want speed and flexibility. Security wants stronger controls. Legal cares about liability. Procurement focuses on cost and timing, and third parties want quick agreements. Handling these tensions is a normal part of the job. 

The goal isn’t to win every argument or block progress. Good TPRM work means raising concerns clearly, explaining trade-offs, and helping others make reasonable decisions without causing extra friction or damaging relationships. 

Ways to strengthen this area include: 

• During a difficult conversation or escalation, start by clearly summarizing the other party’s priorities or concerns before presenting your own risk perspective or recommendations. 

• When documenting disagreements or unresolved concerns, frame the situation around available options, tradeoffs, and potential impacts rather than reducing it to a simple approval-versus-rejection decision. 

• Observe how experienced leaders in your organization handle difficult stakeholder conversations, especially where business pressure and risk concerns collide. 

• After a challenging meeting, reflect on which communication approaches helped move the discussion forward and which ones created defensiveness or blocked progress. 

Getting better at this builds your credibility and helps others see TPRM as a collaborative partner who solves problems, not just a gatekeeper. 

Growing Yourself and Your Team 

If you lead a TPRM function, these same capabilities apply at the team level. The work is changing, and so are expectations. It is not enough to build processes and buy tools. Teams need chances to practice, learn from mistakes, and grow in both technical and soft skills. To ensure ongoing development is effective, consider tracking team growth through regular skills assessments, structured feedback sessions, and peer reviews. These approaches help you spot where the team is making progress and where more support is needed. 

You don’t need a formal rotation program. Small, intentional opportunities within your current work can help people grow. 

In practice, that can look like: 

• Giving analysts chances to present their own work instead of always presenting for them, then debriefing afterward on what landed well and what could be clearer next time. 

• Inviting team members to observe a contract negotiation, a difficult third party call, or a high-stakes risk discussion, and then talking through why certain points were pushed, where tradeoffs were made, and how tone influenced the outcome. 

• Using real assessments, incidents, or escalations as teaching moments, walking through not just what decision was made, but how you weighed business pressure, control gaps, and relationship impact. 

• Pairing less experienced staff with more senior colleagues on complex third parties so they can see how judgment is applied, not just how checklists are completed. 

These practices help move TPRM from just following steps to building real judgment, which is more important than ever. 

Conclusion 

Third party risk management will continue to evolve as long as organizations rely on external products, services, platforms, and partners. There is no way to predict exactly what the next few years will bring, whether that is new regulatory pressure, different operating models, more embedded AI, or risks that are not getting enough attention today. What tends to set the most effective people in this field apart is a strong grasp of the foundations, paired with communication, judgment, stakeholder management, and a willingness to keep learning as the environment changes. 

For people already doing this work, that means keeping your eyes open, staying curious, and treating the job itself as part of your ongoing development. With so many skills to develop, it helps to prioritize based on both organizational needs and your personal areas for improvement. Start by talking with your manager or stakeholders about which risks or capabilities are most urgent for your business right now. Consider where you feel least confident or where you have received feedback, and target skill-building there first. Reviewing recent incidents, business objectives, or audit findings can also help you choose the most relevant areas to focus on. By identifying a few high-impact skills to work on at a time, you can make continuous progress without becoming overwhelmed. 

For those leading teams, it also means building the bench, creating opportunities for people to grow, and helping strong practitioners expand into the more extensive range the field now demands. 

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Author Bio

Hilary Jewhurst

Sr. Membership & Education Coordinator at TPRA

Hilary Jewhurst is a seasoned expert in third party risk and risk operations, with nearly two decades of experience across financial services, fintech, and the nonprofit sector. She has built and scaled third party risk programs from the ground up, designed enterprise-wide training initiatives, and developed widely respected content that helps organizations navigate regulatory complexity with clarity and confidence.

Known for turning insight into action, Hilary’s thought leadership and educational work have become go-to resources for professionals looking to mature their TPRM programs. She regularly publishes articles, frameworks, and practical guides that break down complicated risk topics into meaningful, accessible strategies.

Hilary recently joined the Third Party Risk Association (TPRA) as a staff member, supporting industry-wide education, peer learning, and advancing best practices. She is also the founder of TPRM Success, a boutique consultancy that helps organizations strengthen their third party risk management capabilities through targeted training, tools, and strategic guidance.