Choose a setting that is conducive to reduced stimulation, and choose a job with duties that are already safely within the student’s capacity, especially if this is a first job.
- Unloading incoming trucks, sorting and delivering to appropriate department – moving boxes, operating forklift
- Processing incoming merchandise: preparing, matching to inventory, sorting, folding, hanging, tagging, etc.)
- Routing merchandise to display location
- Presenting merchandise for display – folding, stacking, and organizing
- Stocking and restocking shelves, block and front
- Applying price stickers or tags, labeling, pricing
- Conducting inventory of existing merchandise, using a scanner, entering data for inventory
- Processing orders for mailing: reviewing order, obtaining merchandise, packaging, reviewing billing, shipping and mailing procedure
- Setting up and replacing signs
- Cleaning and maintaining store areas
Consider the customer service responsibilities of Retail Sales:
- Greeting customers and checking purchases at door
- Customer service – answering questions, directing to location, finding price
- Scanning for sale and handling purchases – cash register, financial transactions, identification checks
- Packaging, bagging and wrapping aspects of customer service
- Processing exchanges
- Cash drawer procedures – counting, accounting, matching to sales data
Consider the entry-level Accounting and Business opportunities that may be available:
- Classifying and sorting expense records, receipts, financial reports in employer’s filing system – mail or electronic records
- Processing of documents – copying. collating, faxing, scanning
- Electronic file management – financial data, spreadsheets, databases
- Reconciling accounts
- Targeted marketing and business research – producing information for use in reports, presentations including databases and graphics
- Promotional activities – phone sales or research
- Applying standard conventions of grammar and usage, capitalization, spelling, and punctuation when proofreading and writing.
Because each environment and each job is so different, our approach here is to provide you with questions and reminders in a sequential process intended to support your analysis of and intervention for the specific retail and business skills in a specific position. Your review of this process and the examples will support you in designing a comparable process for other concrete skills requiring instruction.
In addition to the instructor’s background knowledge of the student’s abilities, what information can selected questions from the self-assessments provide? How can you individualize the Career Planning Self-Assessments based on your knowledge of the student? You have options of 1) Retail Operations and Marketing: Retail Sales or 2) Retail Operations and Marketing: Accounting, Business and Marketing. How can you break them down to prevent the student from being overwhelmed? Use your background knowledge to select items from the self-assessments that will support job and career path development before job training or job seeking.
What is the balance of variation and routine in duties or tasks in job training or in paid employment that will support long-term success for the student? Some of the tasks should engage the student’s interests. He should find satisfaction in the completion of at least some of the duties.
Retail Operations and Marketing- Retail Sales Interests
Getting the Job Match
Aim at a job in which the student can quickly perform over 80% of job duties independently. This is the aim because Job-Keeping issues, or ‘soft skills,’ are often the major challenges that will require direct instruction, visual supports and emphasis. For the 20% (or less) of job duties that are a challenge, make sure that the student has emerging or partial abilities with those job duties. Can customer service be removed from the job description and replaced by other responsibilities that the student can complete well? If someone has to teach the student multiple concrete job skills for longer than a few weeks, this may not be a good job match. Ongoing monitoring of concrete job skills and job-keeping behaviors will be necessary to assure quality and improvement. However, ongoing teaching of multiple skills in a work setting is not consistent with independent work skills.
Entry-level job training or paid work may be available in retail operations or in clerical/accounting operations in certain businesses. These are excellent entry points for a student to experience the business environment. First, the instructor assesses the student and his interests. Entry level retail positions often involve a combination of processing of incoming/outgoing merchandise and customer service around merchandise. Contrast the social skills required for customer service with the concrete requirements in processing and preparing merchandise for display or shipping. In many situations, there will be opportunties to carve out a job training or paid position that emphasizes the processing of merchandise.
Shipping and receiving jobs of this kind may match the detail-oriented thinker. Since predictability is often an issue for some, applying set procedures to incoming or outgoing information and merchandise can be a positive alternative to the unexpected behavior of customers.
It may be your experience that the student may fit in a retail shipping and receiving position with very concrete duties. Or the student may be capable of more complex customer service or accounting duties. Use the student’s self-assessment of his strengths and his projected interests and use the self-assessments to narrow down and define potential jobs that will benefit the student.
Look at the general sequence of tasks in the retail or business office setting. Look at the distances traveled in transitions and the spaces through which transitions occur. Are there distractions? Are materials and space well organized? Sometimes negotiating a different sequence of tasks or minor adjustments to the space and materials will be quite acceptable to the supervisor if she knows that these adjustments will lead to better work quality. *Note that even a chaotic retail setting (discount stores, thrift shops, etc.) can be structured to create work stations that support focused and productive activity! When you go, look for ways to reorganize the space to support the student’s efficiency.
It is often critical to not only observe the skill in that setting, but to also go through the steps of the job yourself and list the steps as a result of performing the task. Listing the steps of a task allows you to identify the potential trouble spots and to develop visual supports that will support student independence. Doing this before expecting the student to perform the skill or task will prevent student, supervisor and instructor frustration and potential failure.
The instructor may feel like she does not have time to do this. Not doing so leads to failed job sites. If your goal is positive post-school outcomes, find a way to at least observe the task being performed and make the task analysis before expecting the student to perform it.