Megan and Ceira's stories

Megan
Hi I'm Megan, I'm 15 years old and I go to the course one day a week to do a BTEC. I've been doing it for two years now so this is my second year at it. We've been looking at all different types of retail selling. How they sell things and why they do it and things like that.

Ceira Pabla
My name is Ceira Pabla, I'm 15 years old and I'm doing a BETC retail and distribution course. In this course we've been going to Meadowhall and looking in the shops and analysing the way they do different things in each different shop. Our tutor used to work in retail so we know she knows what she's talking about from personal experience and not what people have told her.

Tutor
I've done retailing for many, many years so a lot of what I teach I can actually relate to experience and bring experience in to it as well. The really good thing about these course as well as getting your qualification, is it helps them with the communication. They are actually working with students not from their school so they learn to work with other people and work as a team. We do loads of presentations, so by the end of it they're all confident enough to present, which at 16 is fantastic.

Ceira Pabla
In a task, what we would usually do is we would go to Meadowhall and pick a shop. We collect all the leaflets from that shop and bring them over here, on the computers. Then we'd look into the shop then we'd go onto the internet to find out how they run their shop, who manages it, what management they use.

Megan
We'll be looking at one thing like how they dress the shop, or the next time we'll be looking at how the staff is and how they help the customer. I enjoy the fact that we find out more about retail. We realise how everything's not easy, everything's there for a reason.

Ceira Pabla
Yes, the process of selling is a lot more complicated. The way they have to sell different products - it's a lot different to what I thought is was.

Tutor
They'll so sales and finance. How do you set a business up? How do managers decide if their sales a doing well? What do they do if they're not doing well? Do they change the sales floor around? Do they relocate things? They'll find out about transport and distribution of how things get from the manufacturers to the retailer. Years ago there used to be independent traders, whereas nowadays there's internet shopping and all different types of shopping.

Ceira Pabla
You have to find out every detail. Look into the history of shops and not only from two years back but to twenty years back to when it started. It's hard.

Tutor
When your working in retail people tell you what to do so you automatically do it, but nobody tells you why you're doing it. Whereas we, in this qualification, say why you're doing it. Why you're putting a promotion there; why your sales floor is laid out this way. Whereas if your working there you just say lay that sales floor out and somebody does it. If someone understands why they're doing it they will get more satisfaction out of the job than they would do if they were just doing it because they'd been told to do it. Also these people, I know for a fact, will actually work their way up because they'll have the knowledge to be able to do it.

Ceira Pabla
When I finish school I am hoping to go to Longley Park College. It's a sixth-form college and I'm hoping to do retail and distribution if they still do it there - the catering course, the business studies course and media course.

Megan
I'm not sure what I want to do long term but I would like to do something in a store when I leave school.

Ceira Pabla
I think this course is going to help me because it's more like business studies rather than working just in retail and we've learned lots of different things other than just retail, other than just how a shop works, it's a lot more than what people would think.