I’ve talked a lot about managing your career, so I thought it would be interesting (maybe, maybe not, you decide) for me to detail the jobs I’ve held in my lifetime, what I gained from each of them, what I learned, how I grew my income, etc.
I’ll be doing this over a series of posts that will last a several months (I’ll space them out). We’ll see how it goes.
Today I want to detail the jobs I held before I started college — basically the jobs I held while in high school.
IMO, students simply need to get work experience, ANY work experience, during these years, and that’s just what I did.
Super Valu
My first official job was as a grocery store carry-out boy. I worked at the local grocery store in our small town for several years. It started as a summer job, then I worked 15 hours or so during the next school year.
In the following summers it bumped up to 30 to 40 hours a week (the regular guys took vacation) and in my senior year of high school, when my class load was lighter, I worked about 30 hours a week.
I stocked shelves, sorted cans (no machines back then, so beer and pop bottles and cans returned for deposit were sorted by hand — it was a huge, ugly mess) and, of course, bagged and carried out groceries.
I learned several things from this job including:
- How to get along with co-workers and bosses. It was my first “real-world” job and I learned the basics of work here.
- How to be on time, do the job that was required, and so on. Again, more basics.
- How hard work (and time) could lead to advancement. I started out as the low man on the totem pole. This meant I was the first to answer the call when a checker said “carry-out please” over the intercom (no one liked this job because it was hot outside in the summer and freezing in the winter.) I was also the primary bottle/can sorter — the job everyone hated. But over time, I did well, others left or were fired, and I advanced. When I left, I was the highest-ranking carry-out boy in the store and my main job was the “plum” position of stocking shelves.
- That I didn’t want to do this as a career. I saw that several people (the “management”) were earning a barely livable wage and weren’t doing tasks that much different than what I was doing. I KNEW I was going to college and DID NOT want to do any job like this in the future.
- That hard work and pay don’t always correlate. This was one of the physically hardest jobs I ever had and was also one of the lowest-paying ($3.35 per hour — which was minimum wage back then.) Again, another reason to go to college and become qualified to do something else. Then, after I had worked so hard for such a small amount and had saved much of it, the bank I had it in failed. Yep, and it was one of the last non-FDIC banks. Ugh.
- The good feeling from a job well-done. I had one of the assistant mangers tell me a few times that I was the best worker in the store and he always wanted to work with me as a result. Of course this made me feel good about myself and my work, though I didn’t particularly like the guy (he was lazy) and was dismayed thinking that I was always going to be working with him (it didn’t turn out that way, though I did work with him a lot.)
Beans of All Things
My second pre-college job was for one (very long) summer that I did in addition to working at the store. I “walked beans.” For those of you who are unfamiliar with this horror of a job, here’s what it entails:
- Get up very early (while it’s still dark), so you can arrive at the field just as the sun comes up.
- Get a long pole with a sharp hook at the end.
- Walk acres and acres of beans growing, cutting down the weeds by wrapping the hook around them and pulling up.
- No bathrooms, no water (or much) that was close, and blistering hot days (we usually knocked off by 1 pm or so).
- $2 per hour.
Don’t ask me how I got roped into this job, but let’s say I was naive and didn’t get the full details before I agreed to do it. This was the biggest lesson I learned in this position.
Thank goodness I only did it for a month or so.
To read the next post in this series, see My Jobs, College.
K D says
My first jobs were babysitting, corn tasseling, and working early morning shifts at Donutland. You are correct that jobs such as these motivate you to want something better (it was just an unspoken assumption in my family that we would go to college), but are full of learning opportunities.
ESI says
Somehow I avoided the corn detasseling job, a pretty major accomplishment given that I’m from Iowa. 🙂
JayCeezy says
Feeling you on the savings going up in smoke! All you did was be responsible, while the bank was the exact opposite of what we all expect from any financial institution. If you learned a lesson, am glad it was early because you have applied it quite well after that. A few of my ‘hard-learned lessons’ are found at the link on my handle.
Am loving those first jobs! Very much agree with, “…need to get work experience, ANY work experience…” Am acquainted with young people who have never had a summer job, p/t work, or any source of income other than their parents. Some are years out of school, and a ‘worklife’ isn’t showing up looking for them. Worrisome.
My first jobs…
1) working a food-stand at Venice beach for my best-friend’s father. Awful conditions, unable to provide satisfactory food and drink, and as for Health Dept. standards, forget about it. Agreed on a wage of $2/hr, wasn’t paid for six weeks, and my best-friend’s father handed me $40 (1/6 of what I was owed). He said he’d get the rest to me later, but never did. Lesson: an adult mentor who knew both me, my friend, and his father, advised me not to let this impact my friendship. Hard advice to swallow, but correct.
2) same guy hired me to work a music festival over four days, at $5/hr. Halfway thru the first day, he gave me a raise to $10/hr and put me in charge of a service area. I worked 60 hours in four days. Again, he ‘changed the deal’ and gave me $20/day ($80 for 60 hours!) and claimed he lost money. Lesson: Fool me twice, shame on me.
3) worked in a warehouse, and driving a refrigerated truck. I messed up a few times, and had to take the consequences (broke a piece of equipment by using it wrong, did not rotate stock and some went bad, got in a vehicle accident). Very embarrassing, all my fault. Lesson: do what the job requires, not what you feel like doing
4) factotum at tennis clubs, hit with members, string rackets, run junior clinics, deal with cranky demanding parents and lazy disruptive kids. Lesson: working outside, doing something you love to do is fun. Until it isn’t. No career path. I have pals who took the tennis-teaching route after college, made good money for their 20s but now are barely hanging on in their 50s as they try to make a living in a business that essentially depends on wealthy people’s extra money and time.
5) referee at college intramurals – ugh. I went from being everybody’s friend to nobody’s friend. Didn’t know the rules as well as some of the competitors. Sometimes made bad calls, and was accused of that 10x as much! Lesson: get a thick skin and be ready for confrontation, in a job where judgment is required.
6) warehouse worker and driver – did this for six months after college on swing shift, not by choice but because I couldn’t get a ‘real job’. Working with men twice as old, barely spoke English, substance abuse problems, and they made $1/hr more than me. Always an outsider. I couldn’t see how this could turn into anything, and it was a grind. Lesson: sometimes you have to do the job you have, not the one you want. If I had to do it over again, I would have accepted it for what it was. Resenting every minute of it was unhealthy, made me unpleasant, and seeped into the rest of my life.
ESI says
Good stuff! Thanks for sharing!
I can really relate to the referee job as I did it for several years with my son (soccer). Even the winning team/coach/fans don’t like the referees!!!!
Ryan says
Learned a ton from early jobs – good and bad
1. Sold candy (blow-pops) as a fundraiser in school in 9th grade. Sold 100 in half a day, and realized there was $ to be made. Bought boxes of 100 for $5 ($0.05 per piece), sold them for $0.25 each, made $20 per box, and sold one every day, making $100/week. Eventually competition developed (other kids selling), tried to diversify merchandise (but higher cost to customer and lower profit margin to me), and went out of business from regulation (school stopped kids from selling candy). Great lessons in small business.
2. Bag-boy at grocery store 10th-12th grade. Minimum wage, but learned basic work skills – show up on time, be pleasant, do what they ask you to do, and most importantly how to manage boredom during menial work.
3. Sold Cutco knives one summer after college. Terrible job. Really just a scam to get you to sell overpriced knives to your firends and family. Learned how to spot scammy jobs. If it looks to good to be true. . .
4. Telemarketing. Was actually surprised when someone bought what I was selling. Miserable job. Quit after one day.
5. Data entry. Got much better at typing and ten-punch. Very useful skills to have. Saw all of the older people who were doing this as a career and couldn’t imagine doiong this for the next 40 years. Very motivating to keep up studies.
There’s always something to learn and apply. Everyone is a role model – either of what to do, or what not to do. I think this really translated well into my actual career in medicine.
ESI says
Love this quote:
“Everyone is a role model – either of what to do, or what not to do. “
Coopersmith says
I worked for a subcontractor for toilet partitions. It showed me quite a bit about the contractor business and some of it on how he screwed people at times. Don’t ever ask for a discount as he would figure out his standard price add 20% and give you a 10% discount along with the ugliest color he had on hand. Then there was the incredible mark up on some items because he had replacement stock on hand ready to ship where no one else did. My guess is that is how he had a house on the lake in a wealthy neighborhood.
He had a great mail order business for replacement parts and one of my jobs was to package these items for either shipping UPS or common carrier trucking. I aslo pulled materials for the installers who installed the partitions and learned that when you screwed up they sure let you know you did. I would also review architectural drawings, look at specifications and take down quantities so people could quote the job. I also did shop drawings when we did get the job to submit to the architect for review. I was going to college to become an architect so it was very good practical knowledge. The last summer I worked in the actual plant as he bought the bankrupt business CASH out of bankruptcy and moved to to Detroit. I learned about manufacturing and a whole mess of other aspects of moving a business along with othere skilled trades.
I worked during high school part time, full time in the summers for 4 summers. I earned enough money to put myself through college while living at home and it gave me a glimps of what I would be dealing with when I was finally done with college.
Apex says
Growing up on a farm I walked beans every summer. In fact Summer had 3 months but they weren’t June, July, and August.
Pick-Rocks – Walk through corn fields while the corn is still very small behind a tractor and wagon and pick up every rock in sight and carry it to the wagon.
Walk-Beans – you already described this one.
Bale-Hay-And-Straw – Work a flat bed rack taking bales of itchy prickyly sharp cut hay or straw off the baler and stack it one by one on the rack, then take it to the barn and either unload the rack into an elevator that would take it to the haymow of the barn or be the person in the hot, dusty, no air moving haymow stacking the bales as they came off the elevator.
Honestly, its the best work ethic environment I know and I lament that my kids won’t get it.