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If you want your part-time retail experience to better impress a potential employer, emphasize the skills you strengthened, your sales achievements or what you learned about retail business on your resume.

If you are hoping for a full-time career in on the sales floor or at a retailer’s head office, your part-time experience is extremely valuable. Retail is a results-oriented business. Retailers are looking to see what and how you will contribute to their sales team, so numbers help prove your skills. If you excelled in a previous role, be specific about what you achieved and when you achieved it. You should include important performance details, total sales, average sale amounts and items per sale within a quarterly or yearly time period. Include the store’s benchmark or minimum requirements for each performance measure. This will demonstrate that you excelled in your role in relation to the expectations. Keep track of your performance by recording sales, print relevant emails and take pictures of significant projects you worked on.

Display your commitment to learning because top sellers tend to be people with the most knowledge about products. If you attended any optional or mandatory product knowledge seminars during your employment, be sure to list how many and any key, transferable highlights from them. This signals to a potential employer that you take retail seriously, you’re open to learning new things and that you are able to adapt to new situations.

Were you responsible for training new hires, led a number of sales associates during peak times, or in charge of closing or opening the store? List your leadership roles. If you were called to perform tasks that made you a leader on the sales floor, include the most notable ones and any relevant details about each role on your resume. If you had ideas that positively affected sales, store procedures or your store’s layout, briefly describe your idea, how it was implemented and what the results were.

This information is edited from the TalentEgg website, written by Christina Pellegrini. Please check out our Job Search Program here:

https://www.ywcasaskatoon.com/employment-learning/program-information/