Use Your Retail Experience to Get an Awesome Job with These Tips

Posted on Tuesday, March 21st, 2017

When you’re looking for a summer job or co-op placement, it can be daunting to apply for positions in the professional sector with only retail or service industry experience on your resume. You may think you don’t have the skills necessary to convince employers to hire you.

But this isn’t true—working in retail or the service industry arms you with numerous transferable skills that are highly relevant to professional industries. It’s all in how you brand it.

Brand Yourself

Branding yourself is a key aspect of job hunting. You need to create a consistent personality through your resume, cover letter, and online presence that demonstrates to employers that you’re reliable and mature. You want to represent yourself in a way that makes employers want to hire you.

Your personal branding should also extend to your work experience. Even if your experience isn’t precisely applicable to the field you’re applying to, it can still be appropriate to share it on your resume. Follow these steps, and you’ll build a strong resume for whatever field you want to enter.

1. Take a Second Look at Your Experience

Sure, you folded shirts or flipped burgers. But you participated in more than that while at work, and some of those experiences are relevant no matter which field you’re going into.

Go through your work history and make a list of every time you went above and beyond what was expected of you, every time you took on a leadership position, and every time something you did resulted in higher sales for your company (bonus points if you have the hard numbers, such as ‘increased sales by 30 per cent’).

Did you propose a new procedure for tracking sales? Did you head up the health and safety team? Did you plan staff events? Those are valid experiences that can you can list on your resume, and the skills you got from those experiences are transferable and in demand.

2. Talk About Your Transferable Skills

Transferable skills are the holy grail of the resume. These are skills that you pick up that can be applied to every position, no matter what the type of work. And retail or service industry jobs are the ideal place to pick up some very key ones.

What were the biggest challenges during your day at your retail position? Was it dealing with how many tasks you had to do, or balancing the till at the end of the day, or staying upbeat after serving a million people? In learning how to handle those situations, you learned some valuable skills: time management, money management, and positive communications.

Take a look at a list of transferable skills and pick out the ones that are applicable. Make sure you have specific examples of how you exercised those skills. When you’re in your interview, you can tell those stories and show the employer how you apply those skills to real-world situations.

3. Match Them Up

Now take a second look at the job you want. List the experience, skills, and knowledge that the employer is looking for. Start matching up these requirements with the experience you gained in your previous jobs. When you find a match, put it on your resume.

This will make your life so much easier when you start writing your cover letter. You can identify the top three characteristics that the employer wants, and describe exactly why you possess them.

4. Stand Out From the Crowd

Remember, employers want to find a good employee. They want to like you. These days, most people enter the workforce through retail or the service industry, so having that experience on your resume is not unusual.

What will really make you stand out is taking the time to connect that experience to the job you want. If you provide a well thought out resume with your work experience tied into the experience they need, employers will see how serious you are. You will show yourself to be a mature, reliable employee, and you’ll get your dream placement.

Are you a student in need of some resume guidance? An employer interested in the Algonquin College co-op program? Please contact your co-op consultant, visit our website at https://www.algonquincollege.com/coop/, connect with us at coop@algonquincollege.com or call us at 613-727-4723 Ext.7623.


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