For Teens, Job Hunt a Lot of Hard Work
By Rob Schneider, The Indianapolis Star
May 24–Angela Huizer, 16, had to look longer and harder than she expected before landing her first job at a fast-food restaurant.
Teenagers just starting to look for summer jobs likely face an even more difficult search.
The job market for teens hasn’t recovered since the economic downturn that followed the 2001 terrorist attacks. It has been substantially depressed in recent years, and this summer doesn’t look much better, according to a recent study from Northeastern University in Boston.
In summer 2000, 52 of every 100 teenagers ages 16 to 19 were employed, the study said. This summer, the teen employment rate will be 36.5 percent.
The study notes that the outlook for teens this summer is “slightly more gloomy than last year despite an improving national job market for older adults.”
Huizer, a sophomore at Tech High School, began looking for a job to help pay for gasoline and her car insurance, and to start saving for college and other things.
She thought getting her first job would be easy, but remembered applying “to a lot of places, and they just never called back.”
When Chik-fil-A at Circle Centre mall called, she jumped at the opportunity.
During the school year, she was busy with extracurricular activities and worked 12 to 15 hours a week. Huizer, who makes $7 an hour, hopes to work more hours during the summer.
Michael McAtee, 17, formed a computer-repair company, M{+2}, with a friend, Michael Dunten, last August, but said he still hopes to land a job this summer.
“We are both into computers, and through the process of messing around with them, we learned a lot and thought we would put that to use,” McAtee said. “We try to give people a cheaper alternative to computer repairs and to make a little money in the process.”
As their business card states, “We learned from doing it, not reading about it. You will only be charged if we can fix your problem.”
McAtee and Dunten have relied on word-of-mouth and fliers to get the word out about their business. Now McAtee, a junior at Franklin Central High School, hopes to parlay his computer experience into a summer job.
He intends to apply at stores that sell computers — if he can’t land a summer internship as a technician, which would allow him to work on a computer network. He would like to have a computer-related job that would pay about $10 an hour so he can save for college.
For teens preparing to launch job hunts, remember the legal age for employment in Indiana is 14.
And if you are under 18 and not yet a high school graduate, the first step is to obtain a work permit from school or through the Bureau of Child Labor of the Indiana Department of Labor.
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