The holidays offer a great opportunity that many high school students overlook—the chance to work a part-time job. Many local businesses, especially stores and retail outlets, will hire seasonal part-time or even full-time workers to help out during the busy holiday season. Beyond the obvious benefits of earning extra money (a nice bonus if you’ve got gifts to buy), here are five advantages for high school students who get a job.
1. You’ll get work—and life—experience.
In addition to the work experience to put on a resume (a big advantage for a 16- or 17-year-old, especially one who’s never held a job), there’s something to be said for experiencing another part of the world outside of high school, especially one that doesn’t involve the expense of a formal program or extended travel. If you work for two weeks at the mall, a warehouse for an electronics dealer, or the local Christmas tree lot, you’re going to learn and experience things that you can’t find in your day-to-day high school life. And believe it or not, most college admissions officers would much rather read an essay about how you learned to successfully get Christmas tree sap off your hands than one about how traveling to France “broadened your cultural horizons.”
2. You’ll gain confidence.
I don’t care where you work or what you do—if you work hard and do a good job, you’ll earn some confidence along with that paycheck. I’ve worked with many students who talked about how working the drive-through window, answering the phone, or working a cash register actually helped them become less shy. And even reasonably outgoing students become even more so when they take that skill and bring it to work with them. The ability to introduce yourself to someone you don’t know, to look someone in the eye, to stay calm and composed under pressure—all of these are examples of confidence that can be learned or improved in the workplace.
3. You’ll learn to sell.
Yes, one type of selling is interacting with customers who are considering buying this toy, blouse, phone, etc. But when you make an unhappy customer feel better, you just sold them on a new perspective. When you share a new idea with your boss that she agrees with, you just sold her on your suggestion. When you win over your co-workers and work hard enough to earn their respect, you just sold them on your worth as a new member of the team. If you can get good at selling—in all its forms—you’ll have plenty of jobs and other exciting opportunities waiting for you in the future.
4. You’ll work with people who are different from you.
You can certainly learn how to work with people in your high school clubs and organizations, but almost all of those people are fellow high school kids. My first job at age 16 was washing cars at a limousine company. I worked for a boss who was openly gay (that was notable in my town in 1989), with a co-worker who spoke only Spanish, and with several drivers who brought real life worries to work about paying their bills and feeding their families. These weren’t experiences I was getting while sitting in class all day and playing soccer in the afternoon. Plenty of high school students I’ve met talk about wanting to break free of their high school bubbles and experience something different when they go to college. But you don’t have to wait, and you don’t have to travel, to do it. Scoop ice cream, take tickets at the movie theater, or process inventory in a stockroom, and you’ll meet, work with, and learn from people that you wouldn’t have the opportunity to do so otherwise.
5. You’ll learn more about how to be successful outside of high school.
The world doesn’t look or work like high school. Everything isn’t measured by a grade. You don’t know what’s going to be on the test because the test is happening all the time. And often, there’s not even a right answer. If you want to be successful, no matter what field you hope to enter one day, you’ve got to work hard, figure out what’s valued, solve interesting problems, lead people, add value, prove your worth, and make yourself indispensable. I don’t care how good or bad your GPA and your test scores are, they don’t measure everything. And the working world offers a treasure trove of lessons that you can’t get in any AP class.