P12.S1 Employability Skills: Routes to Success
Case Studies
Case Study: Anita Roddick
Roddick was born in a bomb shelter in Littlehampton, in an Italian immigrant community, one
of four siblings. Her family had fled Naples just before the Second World War. Her mother,
Gilda, ran a café and was in the habit of recycling.
After leaving school, Roddick trained as a teacher at Bath College of Higher Education (now
called Bath Spa University), and travelled widely before her mother introduced her to Gordon
Roddick, whom she married in 1970. The couple opened a restaurant, followed by a hotel.
By the time they married, they already had one child and were expecting another. Roddick
became the mother of two daughters, Justine and Sam. Roddick worked for the United
Nations, for which she traveled extensively and met people from a number of different
cultures. She founded The Shop in Brighton, in 1976. The first Body Shop was basic,
offering only 15 products at first. The Body Shop's full range now has over 300 products.
Case Study: Mary Perkins
She attended Fairfield Grammar School in Bristol. She then went to Cardiff University to
train as an optometrist. At Cardiff, she met Doug Perkins, whom she would later marry. The
couple established their first business
in Bristol
in Perkins
the 1960s. This was a chain of opticians
Case Study:
Mary
around Bristol, which they sold for £2 million in 1980, and continue to receive income from.
After the sale the couple moved to Guernsey, where Mary's father had retired.
Mary and Doug Perkins established Specsavers in Guernsey in 1984. In 2007 it was the
largest privately owned opticians in the world, with nearly 900 stores across the UK and
Europe. By 2011 the company had an annual turnover of £1.5bn and over 30,000 staff in
markets in the UK, Europe and Australasia.
Her current title at Specsavers is "founder". Dame Mary sits on the company board,
oversees business development and has particular responsibility for running PR. She has
admitted donning disguises and visiting Specsavers stores, posing as a customer.
Case Study: Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software as a child in middle school. Zuckerberg
also took a graduate course in the subject at Mercy College near his home while he was still in
high school.
During Zuckerberg's high school years, under the company name Intelligent Media Group, he built
a music player called the Synapse Media Player that used artificial intelligence to learn the user's
listening habit. Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he
chose instead to enroll at Harvard University in September 2002.
He set up Facebook over a weekend, but by Monday morning the college shut it down because its
popularity had overwhelmed one of Harvard's network switches and prevented students from
accessing the Internet. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year to complete his
project.
Case Study: Richard Branson
Branson started his record business from the crypt of a church where he ran The Student.
Branson advertised popular records in The Student Magazine and it was an overnight success.
Trading under the name "Virgin", he sold records for considerably less than the "High Street"
outlets.
Branson eventually started a record shop in Oxford Street in London. Earning enough money from
his record store, Branson in 1972 launched the record label Virgin Records with Nik Powell and
bought a country estate, in which he installed a recording studio. Branson formed Virgin Atlantic
Airways in 1984, launched Virgin Mobile in 1999, Virgin Blue in Australia (now named Virgin
Australia) in 2000.
In 1992, to keep his airline company afloat, Branson sold the Virgin label to EMI for £500 million.
Branson says that he wept when the sale was completed since the record business had been the
birth of the Virgin Empire. He later formed V2 Records to re-enter the music business.
Case Study: Karren Brady
Karren Brady is an English sporting executive, television broadcaster, newspaper columnist,
author and novelist. Brady's first job was working at Saatchi & Saatchi, an advertising agency,
as a graduate trainee, even though she did not have a degree. In a Sunday Times Business
Section profile she admitted that she had lied in her job application by stating that she did have
a degree. She became managing director of Birmingham City Football Club in March 1993,
when only 23 years old, and in 2002 became the first woman to hold such a post in the top flight
of English football when the team was promoted. She left the club in October 2009 after it was
sold for £82,000,000.
In January 2010 she was appointed vice-chairman of West Ham United. She is currently Lord
Sugar's aide on the BBC 1's TV show The Apprentice and writes regular columns for Woman &
Home magazine and The Sun. She has also published four books including two novels
Case Study: Alan Sugar
Alan Michael Sugar is a British business magnate, media personality, and political advisor. After
leaving school at 16, he worked briefly for the civil service as a statistician at the Ministry of
Education. He started selling car aerials and electrical goods out of a van he had bought with his
savings of £50.
Sugar founded Amstrad in 1968, the name being an acronym of his initials – Alan Michael Sugar
Trading. The company began as a general importer/exporter and wholesaler, but soon
specialised in consumer electronics. By 1970, the first manufacturing venture was underway.
Sugar is also notable for his time as chairman of Tottenham Hotspur from 1991 to 2001. Sugar
appears in the BBC TV series The Apprentice.
Case Study: Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey is an American media proprieter, talk show host, actress, producer and
philanthropist. She was born into poverty, to a single mother in Mississippi and experienced
considerable hardship during her childhood. Her first job as a teenager was working at a
grocery store but she started working part-time doing the news at a local black radio station
when she was 17 and by 19 she was co-anchor on the local evening news. She won a
scholarship to Tennessee State University where she studied communication.
In 1984, Oprah fronted a Chicago talk-show which was so successful that two years later, the
Oprah Winfrey Show was launched. Her show became the highest rated talk show in the US,
attracting 13.1m viewers, being aired in 140 countries and this led to her establishing her own
media production company, Harpo Productions. She is credited with creating a more intimate
confessional form of media communication and is renowned for her celebrity interviews, perhaps
most famously with Michael Jackson in 1993. She has starred in several movies, US TV shows
and provided the voice to several children’s films. Oprah has been ranked the richest AfricanAmerican of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history and is
considered one of the most influential women in the world.
Case Study: Jamie Oliver
Jamie Oliver is a British chef, restaurateur and media personality who is famed for his cooking
programmes, such as The Naked Chef, Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals and Jamie’s School Dinners.
Jamie left school at 16 with two GCSEs and went on to attend college. His first job was as a
pastry chef with Antonio Carluccio and he was noticed by the BBC in 1997, following which, his
show The Naked Chef was launched and his cookbook became a #1 bestseller in the UK. In
2000, Jamie became the face of Sainsbury’s in a $2m per year deal and in 2002, he created,
charity restaurant, Fifteen, in London where he trained fifteen disadvantaged young adults to
work in the hospitality industry.
Jamie strives to improve unhealthy diets and poor cooking habits in the United Kingdom and the
United States and in 2005, he initiated a campaign called "Feed Me Better" in order to move
British schoolchildren towards eating healthy foods and cutting out junk food. As a result, the
British government also pledged to address the issue. In June 2008 he launched Jamie's Italian,
his very first high-street business venture. Jamie received an MBE from the Queen in 2003.