17 Benefits of Working as a Teenager

Today’s teenagers are arguably the most educated, competitive, and IT-savvy generation to ever exist. They have access to an unlimited amount of information, are able to communicate with a global audience, and can earn significant incomes through entrepreneurial ventures, all without needing to step foot outside of their homes.

More than ever before, we are emphasizing our youth excel in academics, athletics, arts, and becoming independent. While all of these areas are important, one area is missing: work experience.

Teenagers, while having the unprecedented ability to pursue solopreneurships and side hustles, could benefit in many ways from working traditional hourly paid jobs. Some of these benefits are subtle, some are obvious. Many of these benefits are qualitative and therefore often overlooked when compared with quantitative outcomes.

Listed below are 17 benefits of working as a teenager:

1. Career success - working from a young age has been documented as a major indication of long term career success.
2. Understanding your preferred work environment - large company or small, private or publicly owned, autonomous or prescribed, indoors or outdoors, internal resource or customer facing, shift work or flexible schedule, manual labor or knowledge work, large or small team, product or service. On the flip side, learning what you don’t want out of a job is just as important as learning what you do want.
3. Humility - working from the bottom is a major motivator to keep moving forward by acquiring and building skills, increasing responsibilities, and obtaining promotions.
4. Teamwork - relying on each other, learning from others, taking direction, teaching others, contributing to something bigger than yourself are all important life skills and it's never too early to learn them.
5. Network building - working in any capacity at any age provides opportunities to meet future clients, customers, business partners, coworkers, mentors, employees, and employers.
6. Effective communication - while we have access to a variety of communication platforms, there is a difference between communicating at work and communicating everywhere else. Each workplace and job has different communication norms and it will benefit you to be exposed to as many personalities, communication styles, and norms as possible.
7. Experience being a part of "the real world" - being in a work setting reveals positive and negative aspects of the larger world (outside of the home and school); the more familiar and comfortable you can become with being repeatedly exposed to these aspects, the better you'll be able to deal with them throughout your career.
8. Confidence - contributing to a particular business, industry, service, or product and being able to say "I know how that works!" and "I can do that!" is an effective way to boost your confidence.
9. Resume building - as you gain more experience, you can always remove the oldest or irrelevant experiences from your resume, but having a few positions and skills to refer to before graduating from college will help you obtain internships and your first job after school.
10. Finances - you can begin to understand how your input (effort and time) produces value (a product or service) which provides you with compensation (money, recognition, advancement). Earning a paycheck also provides opportunities to learn more about saving, spending, and donating.
11. Responsibility - being held personally responsible for your behavior and work product as part of your job feels and is quite different from being held responsible at home and at school. This can only be learned first hand.
12. Punctuality - learning the importance of attendance and punctuality and how it affects others, including what happens when others don’t show up for work, are sick, or don’t fulfill their responsibilities.
13. Time management - the importance of completing tasks within a certain amount of time, how to effectively accomplish your responsibilities each day, and how your time management affects coworkers and customers.
14. Ownership - as you start to learn and master tasks, you will feel a sense of pride and ownership over what you do. This is a powerful feeling and others you work with will have respect for your work.
15. Credibility - working as a teenager builds credibility in cases of solving work-related problems because those that never work cannot relate to common workplace issues experienced in every job irrespective of where a person is in their career. You become more trusted when you can speak from direct experience.
16. Adaptability - learning that in some instances, instructions may not be entirely laid out for you is extremely important. Autonomy in your actions is something that you may not have had in other venues previously, and experiencing this sets you up for a more successful career.
17. Working provides an initial understanding of the cost of living and how much work it takes to generate the income necessary to purchase items. Realizing this is a first step towards financial independence and maturity.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, teen labor force participation peaked at 59.3% in 1978 and reached a low of 32.6% in 2014. Experts point to the decline in rural population and agriculture becoming increasingly automated as part of the reason for the decline in teenage workers. In many cases, teens are also competing with adults who have been laid off or had difficulty finding jobs due to the recent recession.

There are multiple socioeconomic factors that determine how difficult it is to find a job, and many personal decisions that must be when considering whether or not to work. As a teenager, don’t feel that your first job has to be with Google, Amazon, or Facebook, as any hourly paid job will provide many of the benefits listed in this article. Also, don’t feel bad about working several different jobs during your teenage years; accumulating various experiences will contribute to the overall foundation you’re building for your career.

Academics, athletics, and other extracurricular activities are important and help shape who you are. If possible, enter the working world during your teenage years, or when you are legally able to. The benefits you receive will payoff for the rest of your life.

If you work(ed) as a teenager, what benefits do/did you experience (either in the short or long term)?

If you are the parent of a working teenager, what benefits have they experienced from working?

Thank you to contributing editor and high school student / Code Ninja Charles Kowalski.

Thank you to Brianna Haag for sharing her experiences of working as a teenager.