Comment: Retail offers opportunity to young unemployed

Pop star Rita Ora added glamour to this week’s Fashion Retail Academy Awards when she made an appearance to hand out the final gong, but the real stardust was created by the anticipation of hundreds of newly qualified students ready to embark on a career in retail.

In an era of high youth unemployment and a frequent skills gap, it was heartening to see how excited this next generation of retail professionals were about the industry and, tellingly, how engaged some of retail’s most prominent leaders - including patrons Sir Philip Green, Next’s Christos Angelides, Jason Tarry of Tesco and Marks & Spencer’s Marc Bolland - were with this ambitious crop of young people.

Close to 1 million 16 to 24 year olds remain unemployed in the UK, or 20% of young people. It is one of the great crises of our time. And in few industries is it as pertinent as retail.

Retail is the UK’s largest private sector employer and employs a total of 1 million young people, making up a third of the industry’s workforce of 3 million.

But a lost generation of young people will not only drag back the consumer economy for years but will rob retail of its future talent pool just as technology demands increasing skill levels from the workforce.

From Marks & Spencer’s Make Your Mark programme, to ongoing drives by the grocers - which are among the most active businesses on the issue - retailers have time and again demonstrated they can be in the vanguard of successful initiatives to find a solution to youth unemployment.

But retail must act further by challenging the disconnect between the reality of this vibrant, exhilarating and rewarding industry and its unwarranted but all too frequent reputation as a low skills, low prospects career choice if it is to bridge the skills gap and offer the kind of opportunities the country’s youth need.

At the Fashion Retail Academy Awards, Tesco clothing boss Tarry described the school as “a unique and brilliant institution”. About 83% of the 110 retailers that took students from the academy for work placements said afterwards that they would employ them.

With an industry this engaged in uncovering talent, retailers are doing their bit, but it’s time to up the game further to provide opportunity and counter negative stereotypes. We at Retail Week will do all we can to help.