Retail careers
Mad about music? Got a passion for fashion? Want a career working with the products you love? Try retail on for size!
There is a lot more to retail than you might think. It is one of the most diverse, fast paced and exciting sectors to work in.
From visual merchandisers, planning creative window displays, to marketing teams planning the promotion of new products and store managers directing teams to deliver a great customer experience, nearly 3 million people work in the 291,000 retail businesses in the UK. There is a wide range of job roles with opportunities for rapid career progression.
In retail, the finance teams are more than just bean counters. They plan and secure the strategic and financial future of the business. They monitor each store’s performance, allocate the resources, look at risk, evaluate financial risk and work with the links in the chain to develop product range and pricing.
Keeping the whole show on the road is an efficient chauffeur system for the products - logistics.
This department transports everything from factory to front of store, through road, rail, sea and air, making sure it arrives on time, on schedule and in the right place.
IT departments provide the most efficient systems that support the complete supply chain. When doing its job well, it goes unnoticed but IT departments are becoming increasingly high profile with the rise of online retailing.
Visual merchandisers create the best store layouts and the most eye catching shop windows.
Visual merchandising is visual theatre that gets your buying impulses buzzing from the minute you walk past.
Marketing and public relations (PR) departments are megaphones for the business and use TV, radio, online and print media to get the message across about their brand and their products.
Human Resources departments attract, hire and train the talent, making sure every department has the best people in the best positions.
From interviewing potential staff to reviewing salaries and performance, HR professionals organise and motivate, identify skills gaps, build confidence and occasionally lay down the law to maximise the human potential in the business.
Every product appears thanks to a careful process of selection and sampling from suppliers. Buyers are seen as having the glitzy job of jetting around the world, but the role comes with responsibility.
Buyers live in the future and have to get it right, predicting tomorrow’s tastes and trends by trawling through the internet, travelling to see merchandise and attending trade shows.
The link between buyers and the sales floor, merchandisers supply departments with the lowdown on how products perform and making sure the right products are in the right place at the right time.
This means keeping an eye on stock, checking out buying trends and predicting what will sell and in what amounts.
With jobs ranging from sales assistants to store managers, operations deals with customers, ensures excellent service and keeps the store a place where products turn into profit.
