CAPABILITIES AND SKILL REQUIREMENTS FOR EMPLOYEES OF SELECT ORGANIZED FASHION RETAIL OUTLETS OF TEXTILE AND CLOTHING IN CHENNAI: A STUDY

Abstract

Retail sector organized and unorganized have gone through major transformation and witnessed tremendous growth during the past few years. Fashion and clothing is the largest segment of organized retailing in India. This study presents the skills and capabilities requirement of the employees in these organized sectors. The skills were ascertained based on technical, interpersonal and strategic & retail skills. 40 questionnaires were distributed to the employees one each of menswear, women swear, kids wear and all types of clothing of select organized Textile Retail Outlets in Chennai irrespective of their designation of which 37 (92.5%) were responded. The reliability test using Cronbachs alpha (α) indicates that all the variables thus taken up for the study were good and the value of the variables ranges between 0.846 and 0.958. Among the technical skills, ‘knowledge of product and ability to communicate to customers’, ‘ability to handle difficult or demanding customer’ and ‘understanding the local market trend essential’ are given predominance by the respondents. The same opinion can be seen among gender, years of experience, nature of the retail outlet and product category with change in order of preference. Among the interpersonal skills whenever they feel stressed, they distress themselves by optimistic approach, always wanted to update their knowledge’ and rely on themselves for all their information needs. The study shows that there is no unique opinion between genders, years of experience, and nature of the retail outlet and product category on interpersonal skills. In the case of strategic & fashion retail skills, majority of them indicated energy, creative and humility as their order of preference. The correlation technique thus adopted for strategic & fashion retail skills indicated significant at 99% and 95% level. The hierarchical cluster analysis indicates three clusters. Factor analysis has also been employed to identify the number of components. There exist three factors whose, Eigen value is more than 1 and the factors are named as proactive, inquisitive and habitual employees. Among the 37 respondents, 12 each in proactive and inquisitive nature employees and 13 as habitual employees. Thus the study provides awareness on different types of skills required for the employees of organized fashion retail outlets of textile and clothing in Chennai.