It’s that time of year when students are out looking for employment to fill their time, but more important, to fill their wallets. For post-secondary students especially, the money earned through the summer is vital to paying expenses through the coming school year.
But summer jobs are about more than money.
Canadian Press reporter Romina Mauro, in a story published in Wednesday’s Times Colonist, interviewed experts who said summer jobs, even menial ones not related to a career path, are more valuable than some young people might think.
A human resources director for a management consulting firm that recruits university students said that, besides grades, he looks at what part-time jobs the students have had.
“It’s not about where the work was performed or the employer, it’s more about what they did,” he said. “It could be completely in a different field. It’s all about what you did with that experience.”
While it’s good to get experience in your chosen field, sometimes the work you do outside your field tells more about you.
“Flipping burgers” has become a code word for the lowest kind of menial, dead-end work, but that is an unfair and inaccurate assessment. True, it might not be at the top of anyone’s career preferences, but it’s honourable work if done honourably. I have snickered at seeing someone in a fast-food restaurant grandiosely labelled a management trainee, but I snickered thoughtlessly.
A person doesn’t usually step from the fast-food counter to a well-paid senior management position, but there’s ample room for learning valuable management skills in such a job, if the worker is of the right frame of mind. It’s an opportunity to learn how to deal with the public, to develop patience, to work well with others. It’s a job that can instil good work habits, useful in any profession.
I’ve had the opportunity to hire young people, and I learned that those who did well at the burger-flipping kind of jobs did well at almost anything. If they were reliable in their part-time jobs, they were more likely to be reliable in the positions for which I was hiring.
As I grew up in a prairie town, most of the part-time work I had was agricultural. That might not seem to have much connection with a career in journalism (except, perhaps, for stints shovelling smelly stuff out of hog barns), but those summer jobs taught good lessons and provided useful training.
As I was watching one of my employers, an elderly farmer, wrestling to unclog a ditching machine, he looked up and said:
“It’s a good worker who does what he’s told. It’s a better worker who doesn’t have to be told what to do.”
Eternal wisdom.
One of the more valuable lessons was that work is more than a means to an end — work itself is rewarding. I was part of a haying crew on a large ranch, working 10-hour days, six-day weeks, for a wage that would seem paltry by today’s standards.
And we enjoyed the work. We took pride in building good haystacks. Sometimes we competed to see who could get the most done. At the end of the day, we took satisfaction in what we achieved. The air was fresh, the exercise was vigorous, the food was hearty. I was never so physically fit.
Years later, when colleagues would complain about working conditions, one newsroom wag would invariably say: “Well, it’s all indoors and there’s no heavy lifting.”
That would make me think of summers on the ranch, and I would find myself longing to be outdoors tossing hay bales again.
Not all farm work was as enjoyable. I remember more than once leaning on a hoe and looking down a seemingly endless row of corn or sugar beets, thinking there had to be something better. And, of course, there was, obtainable by getting an education. That’s an important lesson — the more education and training you have, the more choices you have.
One of my teenage summers was spent picking fruit in the Creston Valley. The obvious lesson learned from a mistake on the first day? When you pick cherries, you leave the stems on. The long-term lesson is to pay attention to detail, something I’m still working on.
Automation and mechanization have changed or erased many summer jobs of past generations, but the lessons to be learned from work remain. That burger-flipping job might look better on your resumé than you think.
The lesson of doing a good job of whatever job you do is summed up musically in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera HMS Pinafore:
“When I was a lad I served a term as office boy to an attorney’s firm.
“I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor, and I polished up the handle of the big front door.
“I polished up that handle so carefullee that now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!”
