Whether you ever stocked grocery stores or landed a position as a lifeguard at the pool, you know how dreadful these jobs can be. While those experiences lead to the person we are today, our memories often carry a fair amount of icy moments too. Although many excited teenagers feel let down when their part-time positions fail to live up to their expectations, they sure make for entertaining stories.
So this recent hashtag challenge was all about the funniest and weirdest #WorstSummerJob stories. To kick the thread off, Jimmy Fallon started by tweeting: "My friend went on a really bad Tinder date one night. She went on a job interview a week later and her date was giving the interview. In both situations, there was no follow-up meeting."
However, it turns out that people over on Twitter definitely had it worse. Some of the responses include real gems such as fighting ducks while trying to clean a small island and watching jars of jam traveling on a conveyor belt for 8 hours straight. If you’re looking for a job right now, these stories can certainly give some food for thought for your future choices.
But however terrible some summer jobs can be, they are often seen as a rite of passage for many kids who set out to learn more about the world and learn some valuable life lessons along the way. According to a blog post on KidsHealth, these temporary gigs have plenty of benefits and can teach people valuable life skills.
First, they provide teens with the opportunity to develop and improve their interviewing skills. And the more jobs they apply for, the better they will get once they seek out to get their one-of-a-kind dream job. Moreover, it can benefit them while trying to get into college as well.
Another skill young adults gain is familiarizing themselves with rejection and getting better at coping with it. "You may not get the first job you interview for," they wrote. "Rejection happens in life and it can be hard to handle. The more we face rejection, the easier it becomes to move forward and bounce back." Then, stepping out of your comfort zone and putting yourself out there leads to learning something new about yourself. So teens who set out to find a new job can learn new skills and discover new interests. "If you need to save money, you may learn that commitment is necessary to reach your goals. If nothing works out? You may decide to start your own business."
And, most importantly, new jobs can help grow stronger as a person, build self-confidence, and make people feel good about themselves. These new skills teens learn during their first job experiences can open new doors for future opportunities and, of course, look great on their résumés.
Young people seem to see the benefits summer jobs can provide because according to Pew Research Center, teen summer employment is on the rise. After facing a drop after Covid-19, many businesses tried to get back on their feet and hired almost a million more teens in 2021 than in the summer of 2020.
As Drew DeSilver, a senior writer at Pew Research Center explained, last summer was the strongest in years for U.S. teenagers seeking work, when more than 6 million teens had a paying job for some part of the summer. "Accommodation and food services, arts and recreation, and manufacturing were among the sectors leading the teen hiring surge," he added.
Luckily, economists are sharing predictions that this year, we should see a strong job market for young adults as well. "If that pans out, it would continue a turnaround from the low-water mark of 2010 and 2011 and suggest that the plunge in teen employment during the first pandemic summer of 2020 was an anomaly."
DeSilver pointed out that in 2020, many places that usually employ teens during the summer either completely shuttered or minimized their operations as much as possible due to the pandemic. This meant that the teenagers who often lack experience and skill in a specific area became a less important source of workers for companies. Although last year, when the world started slightly opening up, many of them were facing labor shortages and practically begging for workers to help them out with the needed tasks.
