Aldi trainee graduates get £40,000 plus Audi

Retailer Aldi is today named the best-paying recruiter offering 150 places on its training scheme, up from 100 last year.

The company is bucking a national trend which has seen leading employers scaling back recruitment drives and downgrading targets despite receiving more applications.

A study by market research firm High Fliers has found that City jobs, such as those in investment banking, are the worst hit. It also interviewed 1,000 final-year students, 87 per cent of whom were not confident they would get a job upon qualifying.

Dan Ronald, regional managing director for Aldi, which broke into the world's top 10 retailers yesterday with a 25 per cent increase in British sales, admitted his company may not be the first choice for many graduates.

However, he said that because the trainee scheme offered the best possible salary and excellent prospects the firm was receiving about 2,000 applications for every post.

"Nobody grows up wanting to be a discount retail executive," he said. "But if you look beyond the job title, it's a people-focused job that offers great opportunities for progression. We are now talking to graduates from Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Bristol and other leading universities." Aldi graduate trainees learn their trade from the shop floor and will start with stacking shelves. The salary is £40,000, rising to £60,000 after three years, and each trainee gets an Audi 4 car.

The pay beats the £39,000 offered at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and the £38,000 at Slaughter and May, which top the list of law firms that make up most of the best-paying firms for graduates, according to a survey for The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers.