Edited for Kansan.com on Oct. 21, 2016
Written Nellie Kassebaum
Internships are undoubtedly highly sought after, but I believe minimum-wage jobs have more to offer.
When given the choice, it seems most young people will chose an internship over a minimum-wage job. Even unpaid internships appear to have the upper hand versus low-paying work.
However, if you’ve never worked a minimum-wage job, there are a lot of things for you to learn about life that an internship, paid or unpaid, will not teach.
Minimum-wage work is not desired for many reasons. These jobs demand a lot, physically and mentally, offer few rewards, don’t promote workplace mobility, and are generally very stressful.
But these and empirical facts about wages and buying power from institutions like the Pew Research Center only tell part of the story. The lessons gleaned from working these types of jobs are priceless.
From learning good customer service skills to developing a solid work ethic, a minimum wage job will teach you more about yourself and about life than an internship ever could. Minimum wage jobs especially enhance soft skills, like patience, good communication skills and respect. These soft skills are perhaps among the most employable yet least discussed in the job hunting world. Even if you believe you already possess these skills, and with great strength, I can assure you there is more to be learned. No person can be totally proficient in these skills, but with time and endurance, they will benefit you not only in your professional world, but in your everyday life as well.
I am not suggesting this as a long-term form of employment, but rather as a way to learn lessons about life. As someone who has held both an internship and a minimum-wage job, I can truthfully say that while I enjoyed the work I did at my internship, I learned a lot more about myself and the real world through my minimum-wage job. Not only did I strengthen the soft skills mentioned above, I am also better able to empathize with those who currently hold minimum-wage jobs. Plainly stated, it’s hard work.
This was especially eye-opening because I had never worked for minimum wage before. I learned sometimes the nature of the work can never invalidate or disprove its necessity.
Internships do have many positive attributes, but without having learned the lessons a minimum wage job has to teach, perhaps the degree to which one can learn and develop and grow from an internship is limited.
Take, for instance, those reality TV shows where CEOs of multi-million-dollar companies work the lowest-paying jobs within their company. They see the immense labor and effort their employees put in every day and frequently come away from the experience with a newfound respect for the jobs that some are virtually forced to take.
Most young people will have a choice to take an internship, but if they have yet to work a minimum wage job, I suggest they take the latter first.
Internships are frequently not all they’re cracked up to be. In fact, if you ask your friends that have held internships, I would be willing to bet most of the positions were unpaid and unrelated to what they truly wanted to do after school. Doing this work simply because you can now put “internship” on your resume is almost a moot point.
I can assure you that tasks like copying papers, sending letters or doing simplistic projects do not stack up against the minimum-wage glory of working through rush hours, dealing with a disgruntled customer or taking ridiculous shifts. Those experiences will shape you far more positively than a coffee run ever could.
Notes on this piece: Like the Sandra Sanchez column, this piece demonstrates my ability to see larger issues in a story and my willingness to do something about those issues. When I started working on this piece, it used really vague language and was very repetitive. The writer went on and on about the lessons minimum-wage work teaches, but failed to actually describe what those lessons were. It was a big enough problem that I felt the column wasn’t publishable as is, so (after getting permission from my editor) I asked the writer to add in more detail, indicating where I thought she could add it and ideas for what she might say. Both while I was waiting for the rewrites and afterwards, I spent time revising several sentences to try to make them more distinct and specific. Though this still isn’t an earth-shattering column, I felt like my edits, suggestions and initiative took it from completely pointless and unpublishable to readable and fairly interesting.
