The Guardian UK 300: top retail employers

…as voted for by students and graduates

The Guardian UK 300 features the largest and most comprehensive annual survey of student opinion on graduate careers, employers and their own job hunts. 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 for retail are listed in the table below. Six of the top ten remain in the same position, including the top four: Amazon, the John Lewis Partnership, Arcadia Group and Marks & Spencer. There is one new entrant this year, too: the car hire company, Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

Students interested in retail careers…

were more likely than average to have completed an internship of at least two months’ duration by the time they reached their penultimate and final years: 22% of penultimate-year students had (compared to a 21% average) and 36% of final-year students had (compared to a 33% average)
were among the most entrepreneurially minded: 25% of students agreed with the statement ‘I am thinking about founding my own start-up company during or straight after my studies’, a figure matched only by students interested in IT
were likely to consider a retailer’s products when comparing employers: 20% rated ‘attractive products/services’ as a ‘very important’ factor (compared to an average of 17%).*

*Statistics have been rounded.

Over 73,500 undergraduates took part in the trendence Graduate Survey, which formed the basis of the results in The Guardian UK 300.