Walk down any high street and you’ll see chain stores, independent shops, cafés, hairdressers, pubs, restaurants… You could put yourself in a strong position for a job in any one of them with an Apprenticeship within Retail and Commercial Enterprise.
You could find yourself advising customers, arranging window displays or learning how to manage a shop. You could pick up experience in sales and marketing – essential stuff for any business. Or you could learn technical and business skills in a hairdressing or beauty salon.
Then there’s the hospitality and catering industry, which employs around two million people – in pubs and clubs, hotels and restaurants, cafés and canteens. With an Apprenticeship you could train as a chef or a hotel manager, or learn to run your own B&B.
For shops and other businesses to function, products need to be in the right place, in the right quantities, at the right time. This process is called logistics. It’s a vast industry – an Apprenticeship could get you into managing warehouses, driving lorries across Europe or couriering urgent packages by motorbike.
With the size of the sector and the variety of Apprenticeships on offer, your working environment could be anything from a cruise liner to a stock room. Working hours could be any time of the day or night.
Good organisation is important in this sector, while your number skills will come in useful whether you’re working behind a bar or doing stock inventories. In many roles you’ll be interacting with the public, so communication and people skills are important too.