Trainee Merchandiser Review

This apprenticeship is a three year course in which you learn different skills and tasks within a retail office. The first year of the apprenticeship you either do Buying or Merchandising, and then for the second year you swap. The final year is your chosen career choice. All with a days college once a fortnight.

You are encouraged to continuously learn throughout your three years of apprenticeship. The first six months you take part in 6 different training courses, and then many others throughout the year. You mainly pick up on communication skills, excel skills (merchandising), empathy and resilience skills. All are useful for future careers.

The course is very enjoyable. I am currently experiencing trainee merchandising and it is very interesting. It involves a lot of facts and decision making; with a lot of planning on excel spreadsheets. I enjoy it however it can be hard, or tasks can be time consuming. The work load is sometime hard to juggle with coursework from college.

The Apprenticeship programme is very well structured. The business encourages you to learn something new and take on board as much information as you can. With one year in buying and one year in merchandising, it is organised with your work load ect. The only difficult thing is that we dont really have a HR point of contact anymore.

At the start of the apprenticeship programme was very structured, with lots of support from the Apprenticeship team and HR team. After a few months, HR become less involved and we had less communication with the Apprenticeship team. The support from college and my line manager is very helpful however.

We attend college at the Fashion retail academy in london offers a wide range of support. This includes contact when we are not in the building, support groups in the college and time to do our assignments. I know that i can contact a number of people there if need be.

The qualification is not relevant to what we are doing within our day to day jobs; this skill is learnt from on the job training. The qualification is Level 4 business admin which doesnt really give us any advances when it comes to creative and buying skills. I believe our college course does help us however.

The business encourages you to get on board with any activities that may be going on around the building or within the business. This is things like, Department away days, TED talks, sustainability / Marketing days with guest speakers. We are also running a net ball and foot ball team and playing tournaments.

Yes

I came from Tesco stores before starting in the office. The environment and work culture is so different, but still wonderful in both ways. Everyone is so friendly and helpful whenever you need it. It is a fun environment to work in and learning is encouraged greatly here. The pay for outside of London is also okay.

The application and assessment process is very lengthy and time consuming. It takes a lot of concentration and patience but it is so worth it in the end. I would say to not give up, research into the business and their 5 core purposes. It teaches you a lot about yourself!