The head of Brown Thomas Arnotts, managing director Donald McDonald, started his working life aged 15 with Irish fashion chain A-Wear, which was owned by Brown Thomas at that time.

It isn’t just an Irish phenomenon. In Britain, former Mark & Spencer chief executive Steve Rowe, who stepped down last year, also began his career aged 15 in one of the grocer’s South London stores. After a brief stint at Topshop as a trainee when he was 18, he returned to M&S.

In the US, Walmart chief executive Doug McMillon had his first job emptying trucks for the retail giant as a teenager – though he left for third level education before re-joining the business.

Retailers are at least as complex and sophisticated as firms in other sectors but the industry seems to be unusually good at recognising and developing talent internally.

A Korn Ferry retail report, which focused on UK retail, found 45pc of the 42 retail CEO appointments there last year came from a commercial, trading, buying and merchandising background.

“Consumer is the king,” Korn Ferry Ireland managing director Bob Casey says.

“You get exposed to the core of the business early on – margins, revenue management, all of that.”

Many retail businesses are also family led, with family members learning the ropes by starting off ‘helping out’ on the shop floor, such as former Dunnes Stores CEO Margaret Heffernan.

“If someone’s on the shop floor and someone’s growing up there, they know the concept of ‘customer’ inside out, so they can make great decisions for the business based around that,” Mr Casey adds.

The same holds for other consumer-facing businesses where learning how to engage with customers is recognised as valuable experience, Odgers Berndtson managing partner Mark O’Donnell says.

That can include banking, he says. 

ING Australia chief executive Melanie Evans started her career as a bank teller at a St George branch in Sydney.

“You get such a broad perspective on why people do banking when you’re on the front line,” Ms Evans said in an Australian Financial Review interview reflecting on her career last month.

But that kind of perspective only matters if it is respected and moulded.

“A lot of retail organisations would have had really strong training programmes for staff, the likes of your store leadership programmes or management training programmes or, even as they progress, executive leadership courses as well,” Mr Casey explains.

These initiatives can help to create the executives of the future.

Aldi Ireland group managing director Niall O’Connor participated in the Marks & Spencer graduate programme in the UK, while Greencore chief executive Dalton Philips completed a graduate training programme with retail conglomerate Jardine Matheson.

He then worked as a store manager in one of its New Zealand stores and later completed a country manager training programme at Walmart in the US.

Mr Philips eventually led Brown Thomas, UK grocer Morrisons and the Dublin Airport Authority before leaving retail for Greencore.

However, the changing nature of retail may transform the leadership track.

“The culture is changing,” Brightwater Executive senior partner Alan Finnegan said.

“Retail is very complex now at the moment. It’s increasingly being driven by tech and more digitally focused.

“Obviously, there’s challenges around supply chains and efficiencies and the whole area, post-Covid in particular, of improving customer experience and managing economic uncertainty,” he added.

He believes the next generation of leader will need to have more strategic experience as priorities of retail organisations change.

“Organisations have gotten very complex,” Mr O’Donnell agrees.

“So as good as all of the grad programmes are, [retail] probably needs more people coming from other types of organisations to manage and lead a multifaceted business.”