Leveraging early work experience

Should employers care about these trends? Why not continue to bypass teens in favor of immigrants, older workers or even workers in other countries?

"The private sector cannot just stand aside while Rome burns and say, 'That's too bad,'" states Anderson. "They live in Rome." He and other experts agree that teens gain critical skills from early work experiences; without widespread teen employment opportunity, the future workforce will be compromised, they say.

"Working as a team, completing tasks and taking responsibility. Kids learn these skills through employment," says Ivan Charner, director of the Academy of Educational Development/National Institute for Work and Learning, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit concerned with workplace development. "Can you learn those skills by playing a sport or volunteering at church? Yes, but if you are a volunteer, you don't necessarily have to show up. A lot of kids don't or can't play sports. Employment provides an important opportunity for kids to learn from adults other than their teachers or parents."

While getting a foothold in the labor market is especially important for teens who enter the workforce directly after high school, it is also true for those who attend four-year colleges.

Barbara Hewitt, senior associate director of Wharton's Career Services, says college graduates often leverage early work experience to win later employment. "I hear employers looking at a résumé say things like, 'He roofed houses in high school, he must have a good work ethic.' Employers understand the value of even manual labor," she says. During a mock interview for an auditing job, Hewitt recalls, one Wharton undergraduate explained how dealing with irate customers in his summer retail job prepared him for handling contentious clients. "That job may have seemed very irrelevant to him at the time, but it turned out to be valuable," she says.

Experts agree with Hewitt. "Employment is what we call 'path dependent,'" says Sum of Northeastern. "The more you work now, the more you will work later."

Rubrecht, of the newspaper association, recalls how teen carriers he managed at the Trenton (N.J.) Times in the 1980s sometimes rose to become district managers. Delivering newspapers -- and ensuring that customers paid for them -- gave carriers "a glimpse into the newspaper business," says Rubrecht, pointing out that the Washington Post's former circulation director, Tony Mineart, who died last year, began his career sweeping a newspaper office floor at age 10. "Young people think about becoming teachers because they attend school. They know about sports because they play them. Working is a great way to experience a profession."

A January 2007 story in the Wall Street Journal offers a host of similar anecdotes about America's corporate leaders. In reporter Carol Hymowitz's article, Pitney Bowes CEO Michael Critelli recalls how working as a dishwasher in a bakery as a teen -- and being yelled at by his boss for not reusing a piece of wax paper -- taught him the value of small cost savings; Critelli says he used that lesson to realize savings in Pitney Bowes' financial services.

Adequate Rather Than Excellent

Given the data, teens appear to be caught in the Catch-22 of employment: You can't land a job when you don't have experience, and you can't get experience unless you have had a job.

"We often ask, 'What's wrong with this generation? They don't have any work ethic?' but a deeper analysis shows they haven't had the same employment opportunities their parents and older siblings once had," says Neil Sullivan, executive director of the Boston Private Industry Council, a business-led intermediary organization that seeks to strengthen Boston's workforce. As a result, employers are finding that entry-level employees are lacking in what Sullivan calls "the habits of paid work."

In an October 2006 study, "Are They Really Ready to Work?" more than 400 U.S. executives and human resource professions reported that entry-level employees, including graduates of four-year colleges, lack critical skills.

A vast majority of high school graduates are deficient in written communications, professionalism and problem-solving, among other areas, according to employers surveyed in the study, which was published collaboratively by the Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and the Society for Human Resource Management.

Two-year college and technical school graduates were rated "excellent" in only one category -- information technology application -- and even that by only a quarter of employers. Four-year college graduates fared better, rating as excellent in IT application, diversity and problem-solving, yet a quarter of employers still found these graduates deficient in written communications and leadership skills.

"How can the United States continue to compete in a global economy if the entering workforce is made up of high school graduates who lack the skills they need, and of college graduates who are mostly 'adequate' rather than 'excellent'?" write the presidents of the study's four collaborating organizations. Demographic pressures make the study's findings all the more urgent, say its authors, because of the coming retirement of the baby boomer generation and the subsequent scramble for qualified employees.

The report calls on business leaders to take a leading role in creating employment opportunities for young people to master necessary skills, whether that means partnering with schools and non-profits, providing internships and summer jobs, or "using expertise in innovation and management to help identify new and creative solutions."

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