ARCHIVE :: JANUARY 2003 :: CAREERS

Job Market
Tightens
For Teens Seeking
Work Experience, Volunteering,
Persistence May Pay Off

By ALEX FRANGOS
STAFF REPORTER OF The Wall Street Journal

It’s a rough time to be a teenager looking for work.

 Just ask Qorah Mohamed, a 17-year-old senior at Garfield High School in Seattle. “I’ve been looking for three years,” says the Somali immigrant, who arrived in the U.S. in 1998. “If you don’t have a job, you can’t live. You have to have income,” he says.

Since the nation’s unemployment rate started rising in late 2000, the rate of job losses for teens has been “far, far greater” than for the population at large, says Andrew Sum, a labor economist at Northeastern University. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that keeps track of who’s working and who’s not, the percentage of 16- to 19-year-olds on the job in the summer has dropped to 46% from 53%.

Volunteer Work

So what’s a teen to do? If you can afford it, think about seeking volunteer work.  

Barbara Blackburn, school counselor at Greenbrier East High School in Lewisburg, W.Va., says her students are doing a lot more volunteering than in years past. “With the economy, you can’t always find a job,” Ms. Blackburn says. “For students to make good decisions about what career to go into, it’s always good to have experience”—even as a volunteer.

Although volunteers don’t make money, donating time at a local hospital or animal shelter can pay off financially down the road in the form of academic scholarships and prizes. “Sixty percent of scholarships we receive require documentation of community service,” Ms. Blackburn says.

For some students, however, working without pay isn’t an option. There’s college to save for as well as family obligations. That’s where youth employment programs offered by schools or local government agencies can help.

That’s what Christina Nicholas, one of Ms. Blackburn’s students at Greenbrier East did. The 18-year-old senior who works the till at a local restaurant got her job by visiting her school’s job service office. The office, which collects postings from employers, streamlined the searching process. “They have a list of job openings … and they give you the addresses of where to apply,” she says.

Another piece of advice: Be persistent. “The more you search and the more applications you file, the more likely you are to get a job,” says Mr. Sum. “That’s the way the world works. You have to be aggressive.”

“My mom told me to go back and keep pushing and stay in their faces and tell them you want the job,” says Patrice Thomas, 17, a classmate of Mr. Mohamed’s who landed a clerk’s position at a supermarket near her Seattle home after a three-month search.

Ms. Thomas applied at half a dozen stores starting in May, including the supermarket, but didn’t have any luck at first. She submitted applications at Old Navy, movie theaters, drug stores, even a sock store. “A lot of people were trying to find a job, people coming home from college,” she says.

As the summer progressed, Ms. Thomas went back to the supermarket at her mother’s urging. “They didn’t call me for three months,” she says. “My mom said I had to go back there. I went back and they set up the interview.” A few days later, she was on the job, at $7.20 an hour.

‘Radical’ Decline

 While it’s normal for teens to be hit hard during a job recession, this time around has been particularly bad. “I’ve never seen a decline for kids so radical as in the last two years,” says Mr. Sum. “If it happened to adults, people would call that a depression.” The teen employment rate this summer was at its lowest point since 1965, and the rate of decline, according to Mr. Sum, was greater than in the early 1990s recession.

Mr. Sum says several factors are contributing to the downward trend. A growing teen population has created more competition for work. Older workers, especially college graduates, are taking jobs usually reserved for teens in sectors such as retail sales and fast food. And the pool of immigrant labor has increased sharply.

The pinched supply of paying jobs is having a disproportionate impact on kids from lower-income families—the ones who need jobs the most.