Learning Mechanisms for Retail Professionals: An Investigation of Warehouse workers, Procurement Officers, and Store Managers

The retail sector is facing fundamental transformations in nearly every part of the value chain, affecting the need for competence development in many retail professions. As most learning at work is informal and there is a deficit of studies of how such learning takes place in specific professions, systematized work with competence development is hampered. We therefore investigated the informal learning process in three common retail professions. Three exploratory studies were conducted based on a focus group and in-depth interviews with 17 experienced respondents from the retail industry. The studies uncovered unknown and tacit conceptions of how informal learning takes place for warehouse workers, procurement officers, and store managers by highlighting essential learning mechanisms for each profession. By providing a taxonomy for and explicit knowledge of the informal learning process for these professions, this paper assists to facilitate future discussions that can help organizations to support such learning strategically.