The retail industry workforce is poorly qualified with a very low proportion of graduates and a high proportion of employees with no qualifications. 

• 17% % of workers in retail have no qualifications
• 40% of workers in the sector are qualified to NVQ level 2

Education and qualifications are complex issues for the retail sector with there being tension between:

• the industry’s desire that skills in customer service/sales occupations are recognised 
• the fact that those who enter the industry tend to be young people who have not achieved well within an academic environment
• scepticism on the part of employers as to the value and relevance of qualifications

Key issues include:

Personal attributes, rather than formal qualifications, are what employers look for primarily - in some retail outlets ‘auditions’ have replaced interviews to determine how new recruits are likely to perform in the retail environment.

The retail industry faces challenges in training and developing recruits who do not have a basic level of education.  The larger retail employers do provide basic skills training for their workers, in large part because they have to provide remedial training in order that their workers can cope with induction training.  For small retailers the problem is much more difficult.

There are questions within the industry about the value of national vocational qualifications and in particular, the relevance of certain components to the realities of daily life on the shop-floor. 

There is a cumulative fall off in the leading establishments supporting NVQs and a steady decline in the take-up of NVQs by individuals.

Graduates are perceived by retail employers as naïve, unprepared for the world of work, lacking common sense and unable to apply knowledge in a work environment.

The integration and assessment of Key Skills into Modern Apprenticeship programmes has created debate within the sector as to whether this will act as a deterrent to entrants. 

The retail sector will require proportionally fewer managers in the future, but restructuring of organisations, new working practices and advances in technology, means these managers will need to be far more skilled and well qualified than ever before - but the A-level pool where the retailing industry traditionally recruited managers is shrinking.  One of the big questions facing the sector is ‘where are the managers of the future going to come from?’  Foundation degrees may provide an answer. 

The industry wish list regarding education can be summarised as follows:

• a national education system that supplies potential entrants with basic skills
• a simplified structure of qualifications that deliver a guaranteed standard
• graduates that have common sense and realistic expectations of the working environment

Source: Harris and Church 2002