UK 300: top retail employers

…as voted for by students and graduates

The UK 300 features the most comprehensive annual survey of student opinion on graduate careers, employers and their own job hunts; more than 71,000 students and graduates took part. The survey determines not only the most popular 300 graduate employers in the UK overall, but also the most popular graduate employers in a range of career sectors, including retail.

The top graduate employers in retail are listed in the table below. We know that the pandemic has produced a mixed picture for retailers and we are unsure exactly what will happen with regards to employment in the following months. However, while Amazon retains the crown as the most popular retail employer, there are three new entrants to the list. These are online fashion retailer ASOS, which takes the second spot, brick and click retailer TK Maxx and German supermarket giant Lidl. It’s notable that only Apple fell in the ranks.

Students interested in employers in this sector…

are the most likely across all of the sectors in our survey to use Instagram for careers purposes – 22% did – and they are also more likely than average to use Pinterest, too (10% used it for careers purposes, compared to 7% on average)
are likely to be more entrepreneurial than the typical student: 30% were thinking of founding their own start-up business during or after their studies (compared to 23% on average)
are more likely than the average student to have had an internship and/or a part-time job by the time of their final year: 41% of finalists had completed an internship (compared to 39% on average) and 70% had worked part time (compared to 66% on average).