How teens can still seek summer work

Grim, grim, grim. If you’re a teen seeking work this summer, it would be best not to listen to anyone talking about how tough the job market is. After hearing that a few zillion times, you could decide to give up on a job search altogether. Why hit your head against the wall?

Not so fast. Difficult isn’t the same as impossible, and there are good rewards for the kids who persist. Remember: If you can get even a little work experience now, it will be easier to get better jobs next summer and after you graduate from high school. Even if this year’s job doesn’t pay well or isn’t fun, it will open doors next year.

Here are some steps to help you get paid work:

1. Make a short resume for yourself that provides your home phone number (your address is not necessary at this stage) and a few sentences about the things you can do for an employer. You can include personality traits as well, such as dependability or a good attitude. Past work and volunteer experiences should also go on this page. Have one of your parents check your work before you print copies.

2. Tell every adult you know that you’d like to work this summer. Then ask for advice about companies to approach, and give them a copy of your resume.

3. Ask in person. Take a walk, bike ride or car ride in the territory in which you could work. For example, if you plan to bike to work, you could probably work within two or three miles of your home. Hop on your bike to see which businesses are within your territory.

4. Next, dress up a little and stop in with a resume in hand. You can call first, but dropping in will be fine. Once there, explain to the person at the front desk or counter that you’d like a summer job and that you have a resume. If they don’t have openings, ask if they know of other companies that might. Leave your resume anyway, in case something opens up later.

5. Just keep doing this; it does work. The more places you stop, and the more places you return to, the more likely it is that you will find an opening. But it could take a few weeks, so you need to be ready for "no" a lot before you hear “yes.” Whatever you do, don’t give up. It’s funny, but your success might come later in the summer when other kids have gotten tired of their jobs or gotten fired. If that happens, employers will want to talk to you, even with only a few weeks of summer left.

6. While you’re waiting for a job to open up, look around for other opportunities, such as yardwork or dog walking for your neighbors. Even if you do these things for free, you’ll feel good about yourself and you’ll impress employers who ask what you’ve been doing with your summer.

And now a word to your parents. Folks, you probably already know this, but teen work experiences are hugely important to the development of key skills. By working for an employer other than one’s parents, a teen learns how to listen, how to work to an external standard and how to persist in an unlikable task for an eventual reward. In many ways, this education in work is as important as other formative experiences in this period, such as team sports and religious training. You just can’t get these years back.

Why am I emphasizing this? After all, it’s not like you can change the economy for your child. Except that you can. What if you and five or six other parents formed a cooperative to hire each others’ teens each Saturday to complete jobs for pay in your homes? Or what if you prevailed upon your house of worship to organize stipend work experiences, complete with a supervisor, to perform neglected cleanup tasks? What if you simply offered a neighborhood teen the opportunity to earn income this summer by doing odd jobs for you?

As adults, there are many things we can do to change the course of a kid’s life; some of them even help us get the garage painted.