MBAs less excited about career in retail

Key findings of a recent online survey by ZebraCross on management students' perceptions of their career choices in the retail sector throw up some interesting facts

Large Indian players like Reliance, ITC are making significant investments in the retail sector. The rapid growth of the retail sector has opened up new avenues, making Retail Management another stream for fresh graduates. There is a dearth of skilled professionals in the retail industry, especially at the middle-management level. The survey is clear that retailing is yet to become a preferred career option for most of India's educated class that usually opts for sectors like IT, BPO and financial services.

ZeebraCross™, an experience-driven marketing and branding solutions provider based in Hyderabad, undertook this study on "Retail Sector - Management Students Perception" to understand student's career choice and help retailers develop better recruitment practices for attracting the best talent pool in the industry.

There were three goals to this investigation:

To offer an updated assessment of management students' perceptions of retailing
To evaluate the personal, educational, and social contributors that led to those perceptions
To explore how those perceptions possibly influence the students' career decisions

The sample size consisted of 478 management students from different B Schools and colleges. Data was collected from B-School students with the help of an online questionnaire.

Key Findings
A majority of the students surveyed know that the Indian retail sector is a booming industry. The boom in the Retail Sectors was attributed to factors like increase in the purchasing power of individuals, changing lifestyle, use of credit cards and increase of awareness of various products and offerings through media.

Which sector is booming?

Sector in boom	Percentage (%)
Finance	11
Retail	33
IT	17
Telecom	13
Infrastructure	16
Hospitality	08
Others	02

Sufficient knowledge of job opportunities

Sector in boom	Percentage (%)
Finance	28
Retail	26
IT	13
Telecom	09
Infrastructure	08
Hospitality	09
Others	10

Mixed views

Reasons for not choosing retail as a career
Students perceived retail sector jobs to be store-based jobs, and most of them were not aware of the various career opportunities available. If they are working as a customer service executive for a retail store, they said that they would try to hide themselves or would feel shy, if someone known visits them, as they perceived it to be a lacking in prestige.

Most of the students are not aware of various career opportunities in retail sector as well as the retailing institutes and colleges providing retail management education or course. Clothing/fashions, food/supermarket, and automobile are the most preferred job segments in retail sector.

Addressing areas of influence that may be more in reach; our data suggests that the educators should attend to two additional factors that were shown to have a significant impact on student's consideration of the field: i) perceived levels of satisfaction; and ii) job stress in retail sector. Indeed, it is interesting that while the students who seriously considered working in retail sector, reported being significantly more positively influenced by lifestyle and the satisfaction of working with the sector; they also reported equal levels of concern about the expected stress of working with retail sector as the students who never seriously considered a retail career. It implies that addressing students' perceptions of stressful experiences should be a high priority.

These findings replicate previous reports that most of the management students are not interested to take up retail sector as their destination career as they are not aware of the various opportunities the retail sector offers. This signifies that the educational program does not successfully convey the excitement of the current intellectual environment in retailing. All respondents, irrespective of their level of interest in retail career, generally rated the following factors as having had a negative impact on their interest in the field:

Status of retailing in society at large
Retailers' earning potential

The negative influences are, however, characteristics of the field over which the management students have little influence.

Students committed to careers in retailing described retail jobs to be challenging with excitement, whereas students not choosing retailing careers felt it to be monotonous.

What should employers do?
To attract students to the retail sector, they should be provided with the information about the sector. We believe efforts should be made for all students to experience feeling competent, effective, and not overly stressed in the retailing trainings.

Retailers should provide the students with summer internship projects. They should also tie up with colleges for the campus placements so that they can attract the best talent to its sector.

Retailers should create a positive image in the minds of the students. A career in retail sector should promise good wages and career growth potential for the ambitious youngsters. Based on the survey results, it can be concluded that the students perceive a career in retail sector to be not so exciting and lacking prestige. Students are not very attracted to work for the retail sector.

To change the students' perception into a positive one, the employers of the retail sector should meet the expectations of good pay, and provide them with good learning and career development opportunities. Retailers should visit colleges onregular basis and should create a positive image about the sector. Personal, word of mouth and the work experience can help to persuade the perceptions about retail sector career.