Summer Jobs are More than a Paycheck!
This month, invite your students to explore the intangibles of working. The issue’s article, “It’s More Than a Paycheck!” may be reprinted and distributed to your students to help them jump-start such an exploration.
Summer Jobs: It’s More Than a Paycheck!
Looking for a job can be one of the more intimidating activities you may face this spring. Yes, “spring.” Thinking about summer jobs, now, will give you opportunities to explore and consider summer jobs that will offer you far more than just a paycheck. These are the intangibles one gets from working which can make a lower wage worth the trade-off. Consider these:
Experience
Every job you do offers a unique opportunity to gain new job skills (customer service, technology skills, punctuality, workload management and team work, to name a few). Job skills not only build resumes, but they also build self-confidence. Additionally, perfecting a particular job skill may alert you to new opportunities that you may want to pursue in order to prepare yourself for a better or different job down the line. Job experience also helps you to identify roadblocks that you may want to overcome, now, in order to meet your long-term objectives. Shyness or fears of public speaking are two such examples. Job experience can also help you learn the core values and the work ethic you want for yourself as well as an employer or fellow-employee.
Another benefit to working at a young age is that you learn about the types of jobs and tasks that you don’t want to do. Anything you learn about yourself, self-growth, is a positive!
Building Networks
Statistics show that roughly forty percent of all people find their jobs through networking which refers to the process of talking with, writing to or meeting people who might be able to provide you with information or a recommendation that could lead to a job. Summer jobs are an excellent way of building networks. Getting to know regular customers, fellow employees and management are all ways of identifying people who may someday be the one “who knows someone who has a friend who is looking for…” Thus, you may wish to narrow your summer job search to those with wide ranging network possibilities or to those with networks of people working in career areas that you’re interested in pursing. But, don’t forget to include your parents and neighbors.
Job Hunt Skills
Every interview, resume draft and job search effort provides invaluable experience for the next time or for the job of your dreams somewhere down the line. What better way to gain interviewing confidence, techniques for interview follow-up and skills for writing an attention-grabbing resume than by actually doing it? Summer jobs offer you opportunities to hone these skills – skills that will also serve you well when applying for apprenticeships, internships, college or more permanent jobs. Learning interviewing skills, alone, for example, will help you successfully talk to a guidance or career counselor, an academic department advisor or a financial aide officer – all of which will help no matter which education/training path you choose.
Identify Long-Term Career Goals
There is nothing like working at a job you hate in order to learn what you don’t want to do long-term. Summer jobs offer all sorts of opportunities to explore potential career paths, vocational interests and from there, the long-term goals you’ll need to pursue. These kinds of goals may include vocational training, additional job skills or college course studies. Additionally, not-so-fun summer jobs can help you find the stamina to complete a boring research internship that in the end may prove the key to graduate school, for example.
How to Keep a Job
Learning to put up with difficult bosses or negotiate acceptable work relations with fellow employees is another immeasurable intangible of working. Learning to be a good employee – one that arrives on time, stays on task throughout their work day, looks for ways to help others when their tasks are complete and doesn’t use work time for personal business – is another intangible you will gain working a summer job.
So this month, think of the intangibles you would like to find in a summer job. As you will soon see, summer jobs offer far more than just a paycheck.
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