Retail Passport: Your Passport to Better Skills Records

The Retail Passport is a simple but effective idea with far-reaching potential. It could eventually provide a much-needed UK-wide skills register for the retail industry, benefiting employers and employees alike.

Key facts and figures:

• It is a totally new concept which allows all an individual’s skills and knowledge to be recorded and checked

• It is an easy way of keeping and updating accurate staff training records

• It provides a verifiable skills record for job applicants

• It can help to reduce insurance premiums and provides protection against litigation

• It can help to reduce the cost of re-training

The Retail Passport is a simple but effective idea with far-reaching potential. It could eventually provide a much-needed UK-wide skills register for the retail industry, benefiting employers and employees alike.

Retail employs 3 million people in the UK and has created more jobs than any other industry in the last five years. The fast progression opportunities and dynamic nature of the work means that more people are moving between employers and jobs than ever before. Businesses have found it increasingly difficult to keep track of each employee’s skills and abilities and every year the industry spends billions unnecessarily retraining staff simply because their previous learning was never properly recorded.

Skillsmart Retail, the Sector Skills Council for Retail, has created a solution to this problem: Retail Passport. A complete record of all the training and skills any staff member acquires throughout their career, Retail Passport is different to standard CVs, which have recently come under scrutiny for their potential to contain misleading or fictitious information, as it is a verified record of both educational and work-based skills and qualifications. Retail Passport takes the form of a photo card that is carried by the employee, and an interactive online profile, capable of being updated at any time.

Entries on the card’s database can range from formal qualifications, like GCSEs or Postgraduate Certificates, to practical store-specific training, such as food handling, health and safety and hygiene procedures. Each qualification or completed section of learning can be uploaded to the employees profile and verified by a registered employer, educational establishment or recruitment agency. It is this verification process that ensures credibility for the passport holder and means future employers can accurately evaluate the skills and qualifications achieved by potential recruits.

The benefits to employees themselves are clear. Retail Passport is a wallet-sized record of all their skills, experience and qualifications that can be sorted into sections and produced at job applications and interviews. It is also excellent in helping people plot their career path as holders can use the online record to form the basis of a personal development plan. By keeping ownership of the Retail Passport with employees, there is also an emphasis on the individual to learn and add skills, which develops a sense of employee advancement amongst the workforce and, ultimately, encourages staff to maximise their potential and progress.

Retail Passport is also a welcome relief for employers that don’t have the time to dedicate valuable resources to devising training logs. It is an effective method of maintaining staff training records across a business and employers are able to monitor skills or identify any training gaps by referring to what is, essentially, a comprehensive skills databank for the whole company. This means Retail Passport is an ideal tool for symbol groups or for use across a network of stores.

Case study – P&O and High and Mighty:

Retail Passport was first trialled from March to September 2006 with over 70 employees from High and Mighty and ferry operator P&O. The aim was to take the existing passport system, created by a private company called

PurplePassport, and ensure it could be used effectively in the retail sector.

The results were incredibly positive, with P&O finding that Retail Passport allowed them to search by a particular skill area and, therefore, enabled them to identify any skills gaps across their mobile workforce. As a result, they are hoping to extend the passport scheme across the company.

High and Mighty saw equally impressive results and subsequently decided to introduce the Retail Passport across their UK stores by April 2007.

Following the success of the pilot, the Retail Passport scheme has now been launched UK-wide by Skillsmart Retail. The Passport has the potential to add real value to employers and employees across the sector, but this can only happen if the scheme is widely recognised.

Skillsmart Retail is therefore urging employers to support the scheme by recognising those individuals with Retail Passports and encouraging more employers and individuals to take them up.

Employers will also be able to register as verifiers and demonstrate a serious commitment to staff empowerment and development.

Rob Cowen