Retailing can lead to management aisle

By ESTELLE SARNEY

Nine years ago Paul Mallard was flipping burgers for McDonald's in a part-time job around school.

Today, at 27, he's an operations consultant for the same fast food chain. He oversees six restaurants in the Auckland region, which together employ 200 staff and have a monthly turnover of $1 million.

He's taken part in conventions in Fiji and Surfers Paradise and is lined up to do a training course in Chicago. He can put the training he's done so far toward a bachelor of business degree, which the company would help him complete.

"I've gone really far really quickly, and it hasn't been about what marks I got in Bursary," says Mallard. "Retail is very results-driven, and if you get results, you get moved up."

Mallard estimates his pay packet has kept ahead of those of his contemporaries who did university degrees.

With a basic salary well over $50,000, plus bonuses, a car, medical insurance and superannuation, he is proof that retail work doesn't necessarily mean minimum wages.

Yet the sector is struggling to attract workers. Employment agency Retailworld Resourcing has five times as many vacancies than it can fill, and the latest TMP Job Index Survey found 52 per cent of retail employers want to take on more staff in the next six months.

They're going to struggle, says Kathy Williams, manager of the Workchoice Day which annually provides 6000 high school students with on-site experience in their areas of interest.

But a survey of 45 secondary schools recently found that retail wasn't in students' top three choices for any of them.

"In the past few years, student requests for retail experience has dropped and dropped, until some schools are saying 'Don't bother offering us retail visits at all'," says Williams.

John Albertson, chief executive of the Retailers Association, says the nine directors of his organisation are from all parts of the sector, and all are having trouble attracting quality staff.

"The industry is doing a number of things to encourage a turnaround so that retail is seen as a career of choice, but we're coming off a low base," says Albertson. "Retail has traditionally been seen as a job you get when all else failed."

This is because of the perception that retail offers low pay, lousy hours, boring work, and a dead-end future with no chance of moving off the shop floor or gaining qualifications.

There are also declining numbers of school leavers, with a greater proportion of them opting for tertiary study, says Chris Malpas of the Retail Industry Training Organisation. One challenge is to encourage tertiary students to see their part-time retail job as a potential career.

The ITO is now pushing its National Certificate in Retail to show workers that they can gain a qualification, and help employers pick quality staff. This can be gained through polytechs, taking either one year full-time or two years part-time while working.

Polytechs offer other retail courses, and some big employers, such as Mitre 10, McDonald's, Foodstuffs and Progressive Enterprises have their own in-house training schemes.

Malpas accepts that the "gateway into the industry is fairly unappealing - but since when did anyone start at the top? Yes, you might have to start off stuffing shelves or on cash-and-wrap, but that could only be for six months. I know of a manager of a fashion store on Wellington's Lambton Quay - she's 19 and earning $50,000."

Store management builds a wide range of skills - hiring and managing staff, shop design, buying and merchandising, IT, advertising and marketing, managing budgets and meeting targets.

Trish McLean of Retailworld Resourcing points out that the job opportunities in the support offices of big retailers are the same as in other sectors - former shop workers can branch into marketing, human resources, IT or accounting.

Buyers can travel overseas several times a year sourcing stock, and earn $80,000 a year plus a car, bonus and other benefits. Skills and experience are easily transferable overseas.

Jillian Paul of Progressive says the checkout counter is far from the end of the line in the supermarket business. She has managers of large stores, with up to 500 part-time staff and a turnover of $1 million a week, earning packages totalling $140,000 - and some of them are still in their 20s.

Retailworld Resourcing is pulling together a number of large retailers to run a national programme promoting the sector.

Switching to retail was one of the best things Vinod Kumar ever did. Aged 45, he is a civil engineer by training, but could see the writing on the wall during the late 80s recession.

In 1989 he bought a small Mitre 10 franchise with five staff in Henderson. It has been rebuilt twice and is now one of the largest in the country, with 4000 sq m of hardware, 2000 sq m of garden stock and a 3000 sq m timber yard.

Kumar also developed a similarly huge operation in Westgate, and now oversees 125 staff.