Click here to download this as a Word document
General information for talks
Speakers are invited to talk to the students on a number of topics such as sales and profit, merchandising and display, storage and security, transport and distribution, customer service, food retailing and retailing fashion.
Overview
It is helpful to provide a brief introduction explaining what your organisation does and how you fit into the organisation. You can then move on to an overview of how your organisation approaches the given subject. For example in a talk about merchandising and display it would be useful to have some photographs of display units or samples of display material.
No jargon
The students are in Year 10, (14 years old). Although they have a lot of experience of retail as customers, they have very little experience of the business world so it would be helpful if you could avoid or explain any jargon or acronyms as you go along.
Pitching your talk
A talk will be successful if it is pitched at the level of the pupils. The most effective talks involve the students in some way. Simply asking questions as you go along helps to keep them focused and interested. Group work is very effective so you could, for example, break your talk after 20 minutes or so and ask them to think for example about how to display a new product, encouraging them to think about who that product might be targeted at and then how best to display it in the store (location size of display, limiting factors, etc) and then ask the students to present the group's thoughts back to you.
You could then talk about how your organisation displayed that product to its best advantage and the benefits, pros and cons of displaying that particular product
Help
Some of the activities may require prior preparation by the students and this can be facilitated.
The students are very well behaved, interested and enthusiastic. They may appear quite confident but then can be shy when asked to present their ideas.
The details of the talk will be confirmed to you along with the venue and time.
