ORONO – University of Maine marketing professor Kim McKeage knows there’s a lot more going on in retailing than stocking shelves and making change.

A former chain store manager, McKeage has been trying to impart that notion to UMaine business school students through a special retail management class, possibly the only such class in Maine, according to one retail industry specialist.

McKeage is concerned that retailing as a career choice for college graduates with business degrees suffers from an image problem and may be overlooked by many students.

McKeage devised the BUA 375 Retail Management course six years ago to help students understand retailing and learn about the lucrative career opportunities in a billion-dollar industry in Maine.

“I designed this class because retailing is such a huge part of our economy,” she said, “and such a large percentage of our graduates go into retail management.”

Calling it a hybrid class, she said BUA 375 is a combination of marketing, management and strategy with a dose of accounting. McKeage’s class covers everything from product merchandising, budget management and in-store displays to human resources, loss management and supervising dozens or hundreds of employees.

Classes like McKeage’s are becoming increasingly popular at some of the nation’s larger business schools such as the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, according to a recent Associated Press report. Today’s retail management graduates need marketing, merchandising and people management abilities, in addition to technology and finance skills. McKeage’s class covers that ground.

“On the marketing side,” McKeage said, “you’ve got a product you’ve got to keep track of, you’ve got a store that’s got to look right and you’ve got customers you have to understand. In managing a store, you have all these employees you have to deal with. It’s a nice blend of different skills.”

Retailing is one of the fastest growing career fields in Maine and across the country, McKeage said, noting that in Bangor alone, the city’s retail growth has outpaced population growth.

According to the latest data available from the federal economic census, retail trade in Maine in 2002 generated $16 billion in sales, had a payroll of $1.6 billion for more than 80,000 employees working at more than 7,000 businesses. Retail trade makes up nearly 10 percent of the state’s gross state product.

McKeage’s class introduced Jason Allen, a business management major from Bradford, to the realities of the field. The class was influential in his decision to pursue a management internship for the summer at Kohl’s Bangor store, he said.

“Through increased technology and the use of information systems, I found that we can learn more about the consumer segment than I could have ever imagined,” Allen said.

Using technology to analyze consumer demographics and lifestyle decisions makes it easier for today’s managers to build store loyalty, better increase market position and attain a competitive advantage, he said.

Part of McKeage’s class involves a required “build-a-store project,” in which students design a hypothetical store and plan out details including site location, product, staffing, health benefits, employee incentives, marketing and customer base.

While many career positions in the retail industry require an in-house retail training program for new college graduates, McKeage said her retail management students leave with a grasp of the basics, so they can spend on-the-job training time concentrating on the finer points of product knowledge and operating policies within their new companies.

Retailers in Maine and elsewhere face a shortage of good retail management candidates, said Cathy Nugent, a strategic staffing specialist with the human resources department at Hannaford Brothers corporate offices in Scarborough. She oversees the supermarket chain’s college recruitment efforts and is so enthusiastic about McKeage’s class that she visited it this spring to speak with students about retailing opportunities at Hannaford, and plans to do so again.

“When we hear that somebody is offering a class specifically about retailing, we get pretty excited about it,” said Nugent, who believes McKeage’s class is unique in Maine. “I think this is very forward-thinking for Kim to offer something like this.”

Nugent and McKeage say retailing is an under-appreciated, even misunderstood career field. A common perception about retailing, they say, is that it’s a field of low wages, poor benefits, and working weekends and holidays. Previously, most business students have opted for the perceptually more glamorous fields of finance or investment.

In retailing, McKeage said, “the prospects for moving up are really good. Managers in the large stores make well over six figures. I don’t think people understand the management paths.”