The Hindu Business Line : Learning to sell

MODERN RETAIL demands competence in skills such as shop floor management, sourcing and display, which current MBA programmes are not equipped to teach.

With business going retail, education institutes are catering to the demand for retail professionals by offering courses in retail management.

S.P. Jain Centre for Management at Dubai and Singapore has a retail management specialisation under its global MBA programme. Garment retailer Pantaloon Retail (India) has tied up with B-schools such as Welingkar's Institute of Management Development and Research in Mumbai and Chennai Business School for recruiting students pursuing retail management courses. Loyola Institute of Business Administration (LIBA) recently inaugurated a Centre for Retail Management that would focus on four areas — shop floor management, operations management, branding management and sourcing/buying management.

"The dearth of competent professionals across all levels in the retail industry is bound to exist over the next few years," says Fr P. Christie, S.J., Director, LIBA. To fill this gap, LIBA has started a three-month programme in Retail Marketing and plans to start a one-year post graduate course in Retail Management next year.

Long-term courses focus on areas like consumer behaviour, merchandising, display management, supply chain management, customer relationship management, category management and marketing research. Short-term courses, generally preferred by working professionals, focus on one or two of the above subjects.

Recently Tesco HSC, the services support centre for global retailer Tesco, tied up with IIM-Bangalore and research firm Integrated Retail Management Consulting to offer its employees a three-month retail management programme.

"Our employees lack retail domain expertise despite understanding technology and financial aspects of our business," says Sudheesh Venkatesh, Head-Human Resources, Tesco HSC, explaining why it ventured into this tie-up. Tesco's course would focus on domain expertise in food and non-food categories.

Though some areas covered in a retail management programme may overlap with those taught in regular MBA streams such as marketing, systems and operations, institutes believe retail management needs to be taught through a separate course.

"Retail formats today are undergoing a change. Only a dedicated retail management programme will help understand these formats," says A. S. Srinivasan, Dean, Chennai Business School. He says regular MBA specialisations merely touch upon common portions such as consumer behaviour but do not dwell on retail specific topics like customer handling, merchandising, stocking, category planning and store management.

As most retail management programmes have commenced recently, it is difficult to judge their effectiveness. However, internship and placement opportunities are available for students pursuing long-term programmes. Companies are looking at hiring fresh B-School graduates for entry-level supervisory and managerial positions.