Moving from retail into administration

A retail CV that gets nowhere with admin vacancies is usually not short of evidence. It is short of translation. You have counted stock to the unit, built a rota that had to cover a bank holiday, reconciled a till drawer to the penny and chased a delivery that never arrived. That is records, scheduling, financial admin and supplier correspondence, all four of them. It is written on your CV in shop floor words, because that is what the job was called at the time, and nobody shortlisting for an office does the translating on your behalf. This page is about changing the vocabulary without changing a single fact. It also names the two things retail genuinely does not give you, so you can deal with them in the open.

Four things transfer almost intact, and they are the four that shop floor language hides.

Stock accuracy is records accuracy. A count, a variance, an investigation, a corrected figure and a signature on the end of it. Change the noun from stock to records and you have described the core of most administrative jobs.

A rota is scheduling. Contracted hours against a budget, cover found for absence, a clash resolved before Saturday. Diary management is the same discipline with meetings in it instead of shifts.

Cash reconciliation is financial admin. Floats, safe counts, banking, a discrepancy found and reported to somebody senior. Offices call that reconciliation. Shops call it cashing up.

Deliveries and supplier claims are purchase administration. A short delivery, a credit chased, a returns note, a paper trail that has to hold up weeks later.

Two things do not transfer, and pretending otherwise is what gets a retail CV rejected. The first is named business software. Admin adverts list what the office actually runs on: a finance or purchase order system, a records or case management system, Excel used properly rather than as a tally sheet. The second is formal written correspondence. Retail is spoken, and almost all of it disappears at the end of the shift. An admin job asks you to write, in somebody else's tone, to people who will keep the letter.

"I want to know when I am working next month." "My back has had enough of the shop floor." Those are the two sentences most people are actually saying when they ask about this move, and both are respectable reasons to put on an application.

It fits best if you have held keys, run a till point, built or amended a rota, or been the person who sorted out the paperwork nobody else wanted. A supervisor or duty manager has more to translate than a Saturday assistant, though a Saturday assistant is not starting from nothing.

It fits badly if the part you enjoyed was the shop itself. An office is quiet in a way that some people find restful and others find very long.

1. List every record you touched. Delivery notes, waste logs, price change lists, till reports, banking sheets, staff hours, holiday requests, refund and exchange records, stock counts, health and safety walk sheets. Write the list out before you write a word of the CV. Most people are surprised by its length.
2. Put a volume and a frequency on each one. Deliveries a week, product lines counted, colleagues rostered, transactions on a Saturday, banking runs. A number is what stops a reader assuming the smallest possible version of your job.
3. Rename the task, never the fact. Stock count becomes maintaining records and investigating variance. Cashing up becomes reconciling and reporting discrepancies. Rota becomes scheduling contracted hours. Keep the shop in the sentence, so the sentence stays true.
4. Name the systems, and say what level you were at. The EPOS, the stock system, the rota or workforce tool, the supplier ordering portal, Outlook, whichever spreadsheet the store ran on. Say whether you used it, trained new starters on it, or only ever opened it.
5. Do something about the correspondence gap before you apply. Your covering letter is the writing sample, and for an admin role it is read as one. If you have written anything formal, a complaint response, an incident report, a supplier email chasing a credit, keep a copy and reread it.
6. Rebuild the CV in office order. The profile is written for the office, not the shop. Under your retail role, the records, scheduling and money bullets go first and the selling goes last. Same job, reordered for a different reader.

Renaming the job title. If you were a supervisor, be a supervisor. Calling yourself an office administrator for work you did on the shop floor comes apart at the first reference check.

Promoting the money. Cash handling is not accounting, a till report is not a management account, and counting the safe is not payroll. Say exactly what passed through your hands, and stop there.

Claiming software you have opened twice. Proficient in Excel, after filling in a template somebody else built, is the easiest claim in this move to test, and admin interviews test it.

Leading with customer service. Every admin advert mentions it somewhere, and it is almost never the reason anybody gets shortlisted. Records, accuracy and systems are.

Sending a CV with a typo in it. For most roles that is careless. For a job whose entire premise is accuracy, it is the whole application.

Admin adverts are unusually literal, which makes them good material for a review. Career Auntie's CV review reads your CV against one specific advert and returns between five and fifteen findings, each quoting the line in your CV that triggered it, with a severity and a category attached. There is no score, because no honest score exists.

On a retail to admin CV the findings worth hunting for are the missing keyword ones, where the advert names a system or a duty and your CV answers it in shop floor words. The skills gap analysis works the other way, turning up to five gaps into direct questions with a first draft answer you then rewrite in your own words. A review costs one credit, and every account gets five free credits a month.