Ramsey County

Making $ense of Dollars and Cents

March 31, 2008

Looking Towards Summer

          According to Monster.com’s survey of 2007 high school graduates, some two-thirds of 2,000 graduates surveyed already have work experience. If you want to help your teenager become one of them this summer, here are some of the top tips from job agencies across the nation.

          Encourage your student to think outside the box.  Obvious employers of teens are camps, swimming pools, and fast food stands that hire for the summer.  In today’s labor market, more teen jobs are being listed by nontraditional employers, such as banks looking for tellers and merchandising companies looking for workers to restock shelves.  Encourage your teen to read all sections of the want ads and to keep an open mind as to what type of job they want.

          Walk in the door. It's often the neatly dressed, polite person who walks in the door at the right moment who gets the summer retail job. Encourage your teen to fill out every application he's offered, and to fill it out completely and legibly.  Teens need to be prepared with a pen, extra copies of letters of reference and have their Social Security number memorized.

          Make introductions and then move on.  You might have friends or professional colleagues who work for organizations that have summer job openings. Offer to put your teen in touch with these people but make it clear that it is the teen’s responsibility to follow-up with the contacts.

          Help them be realistic about strengths and weaknesses.  You’ve watched your teen grow and mature and may know them better than they know themselves.  Teens can be both idealistic and believe they have every talent in the world and hard on themselves to the point they doubt their ability to even talk to a potential employer. They can also switch those feelings of highs and lows on an almost hourly basis. Help your teen realize what are his/her true strengths and areas where they might perform up to an employers expectations.
          Show them how to work with references.  Generally, a reference is a former boss who can attest to the period of your child's previous employment and tell whether he was a good employee. Sometimes your child also will be asked for a personal reference, which can be a neighbor, or friend, who knows him well, or a teacher or professor he's had in school. Potential references are often busy people who need more than a few hours notice to write a letter and/or be prepared for a phone call from your teen’s new boss.  Remembering to thank people who have acted as a reference for them is another step to adulthood for your teen.

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524 4th Ave NE #5, 2nd Floor Ramsey County Courthouse
Devils Lake  ND  58301
701-662-7027
email - ramsey@ndsuext.nodak.edu