The New York Times recently reported that summer jobs are becoming harder to find, with the unemployment rate for teens climbing above 13%.
As someone who is passionate about career education and workforce development, I can’t help but ask - What happens when students miss out on these early work experiences?
For many, summer jobs were where we first learned responsibility, time management, customer service, and how to navigate a professional environment. These experiences shaped not just our resumes, but our confidence and clarity about future careers.
Without them:
⚪️ Colleges and universities will increasingly become the first place where students are exposed to real-world expectations.
⚪️ Career services and internship programs will need to adapt, providing more structured opportunities to build soft skills that can be developed on the job.
⚪️ Employers may notice students entering internships or full-time roles with fewer transferable skills, making job readiness programming more critical than ever.
As we respond to this shift, we must double down on:
⭐️Scalable internship and co-op models
⭐️Career prep embedded into academic curricula
⭐️Strong employer partnerships
⭐️Early exposure to career pathways, even in high school
It's a question we often get: what was your first job? Increasingly, the answer is not something one held in their teens, but in their twenties.
Recently during dinner with friends, all of us Gen Xers and even some Boomers, this question came up. The variety of jobs was fascinating. So, too, was what people learned in those jobs.
After reading this piece about the decline of summer jobs for teens and inspired by a recent Brandon Busteed post, it got me to thinking: what's lost when teens don't have jobs (if they want one -- that's a story for another day)?
I'll start with what I learned in my two summer jobs as a teen:
⏲️ Hospital kitchen: Working with people of different generations. The ability to work fast but accurately (you can't make a mistake with a special meal for a patient). Getting up early and being on time (5 a.m. for the first shift). Doing any job expected of you, from washing pots and pans to taking out the trash.
🗺️ AAA. This was a sweet office job after sweating it out in a kitchen. When I was a teen, we didn't have GPS in our cars or in our pockets. It was all about the map, and during the summer, demand for AAA's "Triptik" skyrocketed, so they needed extra help. What I learned: Customer service. Many people didn't plan ahead and thought they could get a mapped route on their way to the highway. Working on a deadline. Reading a map (and folding one -- a lost art!)
Interested to know what you learned in your first teen job.