Work experience in retail can lead to great things

Is the next Justin King, Phil Clarke or Sir Terry Leahy currently to be found ‘shelf stacking’ in a supermarket near you?

With the furore about the Government’s back to work programme – which many retailers had initially agreed to support – we found ourselves defending retailing as a career let alone being a ‘proper job’.

Much of this caused by the fact that ‘shelf stacking’ became the lazy and insulting shorthand for retail work.

Leaving to one side the rights or wrongs about how the workfare scheme was linked to benefits there has been an interesting fallout from this controversy. That was the surprising number of voices defending retail work and retail as a career choice. Once the big guns of Tesco and others put right the unfairness of workfare’s use of benefit cuts as penalties, it was interesting to read a large number of supportive comments defending retail.

Justin King’s opinion column in The Daily Telegraph came out fighting in defence of retail as well as the concept of work experience. Just as importantly, commentators in papers such as The Guardian wrote that they were scratching their heads at how such workfare schemes could possibly “be good for the status of work in retail”.

We all know that retailing’s place within the economy is enormous and it remains the largest private sector employer. More than that, the range of roles, functions and skills required makes it one of the most dynamic and challenging sectors to work in.

Talking to some undergraduates recently who are in the thick of graduate application schemes, it was interesting to hear how popular and over-subscribed most retail ones are.

Justin King made the point in his piece that retailing is one of Britain’s most meritocratic industries. As many retail leaders can recount, they were able to run multimillion-pound stores or groups of stores by their mid to late 20s.

And nothing has fundamentally changed within retail to suggest that somewhere out there a future generation of chief execs aren’t beginning a Saturday job, a work experience programme, a school-leaver or a graduate scheme.