Retail & Sales

Careers in retail aren’t just about stacking shelves and folding clothes. Your working day doesn’t have to be dogged by the beep, beep, beep of the till. Neither does a career in sales have to involve cold-calling disgruntled people. The retail and sales sector makes up a massive part of the UK economy. Consequently, there are a lot of job opportunities up for grabs.

Step into any high-street shop and have a good look around. Every shop is thoughtfully laid out, from the design of the window displays to the decision to put the shoes downstairs and the jeans upstairs. Every time you buy something, your experience is affected by the decisions that have been made by the many different people working in retail and sales careers.

So you want to work in retail? You’ll need excellent customer service and communication skills. While these attributes give you a good grounding, particularly if you’re working as a sales assistant, you need to develop further skills if you want to progress. One of the great things about retail is that you really can work your way up.

Nearly all retail stores prefer everyone they employ (no matter what their academic background) to have worked on the shop floor. From the shop floor, you can move up into careers in visual merchandising, store design, retail buying, merchandising, allocation and distribution. These will require a lot of different skills, from a head for numbers and commercial awareness to creativity and logic. It’s all about finding the career in retail that best suits your strengths.

Being a good salesman isn’t just about looking dapper and flashing those pearly whites. You need to have a thick skin, have excellent communication skills and be confident. Products and services can be sold face-to-face, over the telephone, via the internet and in many other different ways. It’s not all about B2C sales (business to consumer) either, B2B sales (business to business) is massive.

Pretty much anything can be sold, not just tangible objects (like clothes, cars, houses and cleaning products), but things like advertising space and information. You may have heard of certain careers that you didn’t even know were sales-focused, such as recruitment, and even some charity fundraising work.

Sales can be a highly pressurised career; you’ll have targets to meet and often you’ll depend on earning money through commission. But the thrill of exceeding your sales target or clinching a big sales deal can be unmatched, not to mention the thought of an extra hefty pay packet.