Graduate Careers in Retail
Retail provides a fast-paced and highly commercial setting for a diverse range of demanding and highly rewarding career opportunities. Strong competition, changes in consumer lifestyles, extended opening hours, changing eating habits, greater awareness around food sourcing and our impact on the environment are all helping to change the face of retailing. There is a huge diversity of graduate careers in retail from quality assurance to marketing. The retail sector tends to be very fast paced, demanding and is constantly changing. If this sounds like the kind of environment you would thrive in, then perhaps you should consider a graduate career in retail. Read on to discover what a graduate career in retail would involve.
Many of the career opportunities in retail focus on Operations. Operations managers are often managing the customer facing part of the retail business and must be innovative in their control
of the retail environment, making sure it is appropriate to their customer profile, often taking the initiative in local marketing or ranging activity. Customer focus and leadership are the key elements of an operational role, often with large and diverse teams of people. Careers in Operations however do not stop at the store level, a raft of more roles in area, regional and national Operations management exist providing a clear career route to very senior roles in the Retail sector.
Whilst careers in Operations are often the most visible and easily recognised careers in Retail there are a whole raft of demanding and professional careers within the sector that support the Operations teams. These include (but are not limited to!) Marketing, Customer Insight, Buying, Merchandising, Distribution, Supply Chain, Logistics, Quality Assurance, Nutrition, HR, Finance, Strategic Planning, PR, Communications and Project/Change Management.
Fast-track graduate careers are offered by most of the major retail recruiters. Graduate programmes vary from one organisation to another but usually offer a mixture of real role experiences and off-job training.
Necessary skills and competencies
Strong personal qualities such as tenacity, flexibility, leadership, customer focus, resilience, impact, relationship building, results focus and commercial awareness are the key to a successful career in retail. Indeed you will find that most retail recruitment processes will focus very heavily on your personal competencies and skills as opposed to your academic background.
Necessary qualifications
Most of the major retail graduate recruiters welcome applications from any degree discipline with a 2:2 or above. You will also find that few retail recruiters look for a minimum number of UCAS points as part of their recruitment process.
Rewards
Salaries range from one organisation to another but the median graduate starting salary in the retail sector in 2005 was £20,300pa. The opportunities for salary progression are good, with the average graduate earning £34,000 five years into their career in the retail sector, this compares to an average £32,500 in the public sector, £30,000 in IT and £28,500 in Engineering (source the AGR graduate recruitment survey 2005 summer review).
If you are interested in a graduate career in retail then you should spend time looking at graduate training schemes for the major retailers to get a flavour of what kind of job role you would like to take. Be prepared to work hard, a graduate career in retail will challenge you but the rewards are quick to follow.
the Co-operative Group
3rd Floor, New Century House
PO Box 53
Manchester
M60 4ES
www.co-op.co.uk
