Wholesale and Retail: Sector Skills Assessment 2012
The Sector Skills Assessment for the Wholesale and Retail Sector presents evidence on the sector’s needs and priorities. The three organisations who authored this report are Skillsmart Retail, Skills for Logistics and the Institute of the Motor Industry.
Wholesale and Retail: Sector Skills Assessment 2012 (PDF, 1.3 Mb)
Published November 2012
This is the Sector Skills Assessment (SSA) for the wholesale and retail sector. The aim of the report is to provide authoritative labour market intelligence (LMI) for the sector in order to inform the development of skills policy across the UK.
The three areas of this collaborative report are retail, wholesaling and automotive sales and services. In total the wholesale and retail sector generated UK sales turnover of £1,211 billion in 2010 and contributes 12 per cent of total UK gross value added (GVA), giving it a ranking of third out of 15 sectors. In terms of productivity, retail performs well against the majority of other countries’ sectors.
The sector has 4.1 million employees (14 per cent of all UK employment) working in just over 509,000 outlets (20 per cent of all UK establishments). Over two-thirds of employment is in the retail sector (68 per cent) and just under one fifth in wholesale (18 per cent). The majority of employment in the sector sits within England (84 per cent)
SSAs combine top-down data from official sources with bottom-up sectoral intelligence to provide a consistent, comparable and rich understanding of the skills priorities within sectors across the four UK nations. The reports have been produced to a common specification developed by the UK Commission in consultation with the four UK and devolved governments and follow a consistent structure.
