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- Look after the day-to-day running of a store and motivate staff to achieve sales targets
- Requires leadership, excellent people skills and the ability to work under pressure
- Progress into area or regional management
As a retail manager, your main focus will be to improve the commercial performance of the store by increasing its turnover and maximising sales.
DAY-TO-DAY DUTIES
- Manage and motivate teams to increase sales
- Oversee recruitment and training of staff
- Keep track of stock and ordering
- Organise sales promotions and in-store events
- Deal with queries, complaints and feedback from customers
- Analyse sales figures and forecast future sales
- Maintain awareness of market trends and monitor competitors
- Control budgets and costs
- Provide reports to senior company executives
DAY-TO-DAY ENVIRONMENT
The larger salaries are usually offered by the larger stores. You may get bonuses and commission for meeting sales targets.
You'll often work weekends and some evenings. You'll divide your time between the sales area and your office in the store.
You'll need
This role would be ideal for someone with the ability to lead and motivate a team, excellent communication and 'people' skills, the ability to work under pressure and handle challenging situations, confidence, drive and enthusiasm, decision-making ability and sense of responsibility.
You may be able to start as a retail sales assistant and work your way up through promotion to supervisor or department manager.
You could also get into this job by switching from a managerial post in a related industry like customer service. You would be given training in retail to build on your existing management experience.
Many national retailers run graduate trainee management schemes for people with a suitable degree. These combine training and mentoring with work placements in different parts of the business to develop your retail knowledge, skills and leadership qualities. Most subjects are accepted but you may have an advantage if you study business retail management or retail marketing.
Alternativaly, you could do a retail manager higher apprenticeship or retail leadership degree apprenticeship.
You could also do a college course, which would teach you some of the skills and knowledge you need in this job. Relevant subjects include Level 3 Diploma in Retail Skills Management and Level 4 Diploma in Retail Management.
CAREER PROSPECTS
With experience you could progress into area or regional management. You could also move into more specialist areas, like customer service, training and operations management.