Monday is the most common sick day to call into work, which really isn’t so surprising. Many students that are in high school work part-time jobs, whether they want to have money for clothes or need it to pay for their gas. There are many quality things about working a job and it can teach you many skills in life.
Working a job can give you more experience in life and better social skills along with improving your time management. But at the same time, if you choose the wrong job, your life can be more complicated and stressful, such as having no time to hang out with friends and being alone. I have chosen the wrong job before. It wasn’t a good environment and honestly, it was not fun to work at for 7 months.
For me, work has taught me the good and bad things about life and how as I get older the “little” things will become important. According to Waldenu, working a job in high school can teach you the value of money and the importance of budgeting. Also, it teaches you how to handle the relationship between school and a job. In high school, the job you apply for will not need any education but as you get older, most jobs will want you to have some type of degree. Getting a job during this time of your life can definitely help you and give you advantages over people who don’t have jobs, whether you are 14 years old working at a coffee shop or 21 years old working at a corporate job. As someone who started working at 14 years old, I can say it has benefited me and it kind of helped me mature at a younger age.
Working young can get you in an intelligent mindset but it’s not for everyone. Being forced to get a job will not only make you hate working but it can lead to extirpative things like not following the rules and taking the easy way out, which doesn’t exactly get by in workplaces or in life. For some people, they just can’t handle the tasks of a job.
Holding a job when you already have a pretty occupied life can lead to things being unbalanced. The website Fair Born Digital says that having a job can leave you with a reduced amount of time to study and a lower GPA. In addition to that, also the loss of opportunities due to time restraints and unnecessary stress. Depending on the hours you work, everyone can experience different amounts of stress. But even when someone works more hours, they may not feel as stressed due to the fact that they learn organizational skills along with completing tasks when asked. When I had my first job, I did not feel stressed at all due to the fact it was only open until 2 pm and I could only work on weekends.
Getting a job isn’t just a decision to just jump into, even at a young age. Because once someone starts working, they’ll probably be employed for the rest of their life. Jobs at a young age are not complicated unless you make it, so make sure you choose your job wisely. But if you weigh the pros and cons and want to take further steps, you should definitely think about what you want to learn from your job whether it’s how to work hard for money or how precious it can be.
Keeping with the article from NY Times, some lessons to be learned from jobs can be the fact that being good at school doesn’t mean you’ll be good at a job and that being fired/quitting isn’t the end of the world. Possessing a job, you can learn what it’s like to make minimum wage. Along with those lessons, some lessons I’ve personally learned in my two years of working is that bosses don’t always act like bosses and co-workers can leave you to do their job along with yours. I’ve also learned new skills that now help me inside and outside of my job.
All reasons being taken into consideration, having a job will teach you many things. As tantalizing as it may be, a job is a substitute for an extracurricular and it is something I feel that every teenager should consider. You never know what you can get out of it.
