Wal-Mart 101: Creating retail management courses

Published: August 7, 2006

Nashville, TN – Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen wants the state to do a better
job at preparing students for careers at Wal-Mart. But he’s not talking about
stocking shelves or checking out customers at the retail giant.

Instead,
Bredesen wants to tailor community college programs to offer courses on retail
management.

Bredesen, a Democrat, pitched his proposal on how to address
a management shortage at big-box retail stores on a recent trip to Wal-Mart Stores
Inc.’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.

While no formal arrangement
has been struck, Bredesen and Wal-Mart officials agreed to work on developing
a curriculum.

Bredesen told The Associated Press he would consider an arrangement
where community colleges teach Wal-Mart-specific skills, if the company would
agree to guarantee jobs for graduates with good grades.

Wal-Mart spokesman
Dennis Alpert said Bredesen’s proposal came after hearing from company officials
talk about a shortage of managers. The program would be a first for the world’s
largest retailer.

“Not just in Tennessee, but across the country, there’s
a lacking of certain trained professionals” at large retail stores, Alpert
said.

The traditional model at Wal-Mart has been to hire entry-level workers
and gradually have them to move up the ranks toward management positions, Alpert
said.

Bredesen said working with community colleges to develop retail-specific
management skills could help jump-start recruitment and help Wal-Mart expand.

The
governor said he was impressed by the scope of operations at a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

“The
point they made was, ‘When we open a store, the day it opens, it’s a
$100 million-plus business with 600 employees and all the complexities of running
a business with 600 employees,’” he said.

‘Complex’
work

Timothy Vogus, an assistant professor of management at Vanderbilt
University in Nashville, said running a Wal-Mart store is “very complex managerial
work.”

“You’re dealing with so many issues that are very
hard to deal with, especially the human issues: the staffing, the recruiting,
the training,” he said.

While those skills are taught in undergraduate
and graduate programs, retailers aren’t able to offer the salaries — or
the prestige — that would attract those graduates to manage their stores.

“When
you go to get an MBA, people have an air about it that they want to go into investment
banking or consulting,” Vogus said. “Even in undergraduate programs,
people have the idea that, ‘If I’m going to manage a Wal-Mart store,
I’m doing something wrong.’”

Giving community college students
those skills would give them a chance to leapfrog Wal-Mart’s internal labor
market, and it could give them a higher ceiling for advancement, he said.

Bredesen
was the first of several governors to take up an invitation made by Wal-Mart Chief
Executive Lee Scott at a National Governors Association meeting earlier this year
for state executives to visit the company’s headquarters.

Since then,
Alpert said, Wal-Mart managers have either hosted or visited Govs. Jennifer Granholm
of Michigan, Chris Gregoire of Washington, Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania and Kathleen
Sebelius of Kansas. All are Democrats.

Improving image

The meetings
come amid a Wal-Mart public relations drive to improve the company’s image
after years of ignoring critics.

Wal-Mart now touts changes such as its
lower-cost health plans for employees. It has reached out to selected critics,
including environmentalists and started an outside support group called Working
Families for Wal-Mart — chaired by civil rights leader Andrew Young.

Still,
Bredesen acknowledged, there are bound to be some skeptics about his plans to
work with Wal-Mart on educational programs.

“You can’t do anything
without some criticisms,” Bredesen said. “But I certainly think that
when you have an employer of that size — who has that many good jobs that they
are saying need to be filled — we need to respond to that.”

Wal-Mart
employs nearly 40,000 people at its 122 facilities in Tennessee, paying an average
of $10.18 per hour.

Bredesen said courses could be tailored to the needs
of Wal-Mart, but they could also apply to other large retailers in the state.

“I
really think a lot of the future of the community college system is being as responsive
as possible to the needs of individual employers,” Bredesen said, “not
just turning out people with generic skills, but the very specific skills that
employers are looking for.”