Pros
Good place to meet people and make friends, good discount, free products and samples, great way to further understand retail and the way boots operates. Office culture is very much dependent on hierarchy and people will listen to your ideas more if were you at a higher level in the organisation.
Cons
Pay is very low for what category assistants do, they run promotional planners, pricing, distribution, product set ups, supplier management and relations but only get £15k per year which is just no enough in this day and age. Training was pretty much useless and quite generic to all CAs regardless of what category you look after. The hierarchy system in my opinion is very outdated and terrible. doesn't serve great to motivate lowest level staff. There are 7 levels in the organisation - level 7 being the lowest. Naturally people in the organisation will be less inclined to new ideas coming from level 7s. You can be lucky with your line manager wanting to progress you as quick as possible however from my experience most line managers will want to keep you in your position for 2 years minimum. When this is the case most CAs will want to progress which results in high competition internally and you will get a lot of CAs not wanting to help or pretty much try to slow your progress down and jump on any opportunity to outperform you so you need to fight for what you want pretty much.