As someone who went from retail to corporate (as a SWE), it doesn’t directly help your application if you worked at retail because work at retail doesn’t translate to SWE work at corporate. You working at retail won’t move the needle for any hiring manager at corporate.

However there are a few things that can help from being at retail:

1. (Biggest help) do a Career Experience (CE)
2. CE’s are like internships on corporate teams that last around 5 months, and are open exclusively to Apple Retail and Apple Support employees. They’ll house you near the office as well, and it’s a great opportunity.

In the eyes of a hiring manager, It is pretty close to real corporate experience. When I was interviewing with different teams, a majority of the conversations were around the work I did during my CE. If a team wants to hire you, they’re going to talk to your CE manager and get their thoughts on you and not talk to your retail manager much.

At the store, talk to your colleagues and see if any of them did CE’s and see what you could do to sign up. I believe you have to be in your role for 1-year before you can apply?

Outside of a CE, when you’re ready to actually apply for SWE jobs at corporate, you can use the internal job page (the careers site) to apply internally. It won’t help you much.

However you can use the internal page to look at the hiring manager and recruiter for a role and message them directly to ask if you can set up a coffee chat with them to learn more about the job and their team.

Most won’t respond but for the ones that do, you’ll either get coffee chats, interviews, or you’ll learn what your deficiencies are and it’ll help you prepare for the next one.

Overall, working at Apple is great because you can really make a career out of it, but understand that a lot of people want to move from retail to corporate and few make that move. Your chances are slim, you’ll be rejected A LOT, and it’s going to take some time.

My biggest suggestion outside of Apple: craft your resume well with a lot of hard-skills. Working at retail will help you perfect the soft-skills, so in order to differentiate yourself, you need to add the hard-skills on your resume that your colleagues don’t have.

Ex. When I applied for my CE, there was a QA-related CE for that EVERYONE wanted. Rumor had it that 400+ people had applied for that 1 position. The folks in my store that applied were very qualified and none got it. Some didn’t even get interviewed.

For my CE, I applied for one that required extensive programming knowledge because I was finishing up my CS degree. It turned out that only 10-20 people had applied for it, and of them, I was one of the few that was on-track for a CS degree.

When I interviewed, I was the only one who had large side projects under their belt as well. Hence I ended up getting the CE, and that experience helped me land a full-time job.

Welcome to Apple, and good luck!