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A case for teen labor
I was reading recently that fewer teenagers are choosing to work these days than in previous years. Apparently a number of factors pertain -- including an increased focus on summer school and higher allowances from their parents -- but the net result might be fewer teens selling hamburgers or washing cars this summer.
Trends like this highlight what a tricky business it is to predict anything about the workplace. Since at least the 1950s, we could reasonably project an increase in the percentage of teens looking for work, based on such simple indicators as their desire to own cars and the rising cost of college tuition.
Now, however, we may have reached a tipping point. Neither transportation nor tuition is the kind of purchase one is likely to make with summer earnings. So why bother? As many teens already are deciding, the time might be more fruitfully spent in review courses or in unpaid internships that promise more resume-enhancing experiences than waitressing ever could.
We'll have to wait a few years to see if their gamble pays off with better careers than their summer-working friends get. In the meantime, let me say that I am a bit sad that summer jobs may be going the way of drive-in theaters and Hula Hoops. They represent a rite of passage that provides not only work experience but also bragging rights.
What, exactly, will this year's crop of teenagers tell their own recalcitrant teens to get them out of bed on a summer's morn? "When I was your age, summer school went all day and I had to walk home"? It just doesn't inspire the same awe as, say, describing a summer spent digging ditches or hauling 50-pound bags of fertilizer.
Neither do summer classes hold the same balance of threat and reward as do summer jobs. I clearly remember being yelled at, threatened with firing, teased and even treated unfairly while chasing wages that ranged from a dollar an hour to the hallowed minimum wage, then $2.90. Contrast that with the experience of internships, where students often are treated more like guests than workers. Or classes, where an errant comment can send not the student but the teacher to the principal's office.
I should stop before I start sounding like a curmudgeon, locked in some past that celebrated child labor and hazing. My point isn't that one generation had it right and the next ones are messing things up. I have every confidence that today's youngsters will grow into terrific adults.
But I do have some observations to make, as both an employer and a career counselor.
I have noticed that when it comes to job searches in one's 20s, the applicants who worked as teens are more confident in interviews. They have a better understanding of the dynamics of a workplace, balanced with an appreciation for their own, lowly role as new entrants to a company.
In addition, concepts such as customer service and profitability are more concrete, as they've already been trained (and reprimanded) on another employer's watch. Young people coming from family-owned businesses seem especially sharp on these points, perhaps because they had a closer view of how each person's work contributes to the bottom line.
I understand that "things are different now" than in years past. Hasn't every generation said that? I especially understand the pressure on teens to choose vocations early, to get into good colleges, to stack up degrees in an effort to win terrific jobs somewhere down the line. To make all that happen, summer school and internships surely must look like better choices than landscaping or baby-sitting.
But just for the heck of it, I'd like to toss out the ideas that college might not be for everyone, that those who go won't be permanently damaged by taking six or 10 years to graduate while working to pay the tuition, and that holding multiple and even weird jobs during one's teens and 20s won't ruin his or her chance of success in the "real world."
I have seen the truth of this from a parade of job-seeking clients over the years and from my own experience. It took seven years, but I earned my bachelor's degree while working at a series of almost 50 jobs. And I had to walk uphill to work -- and back -- in the snow.
Just kidding about that last part.
-- Amy Lindgren owns Prototype Career Service, a career consulting firm in St. Paul, Minn. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice. com or at 1071 W. Seventh St., St. Paul, MN 55102.
