Are you ready for your first job outside the house, but aren’t quite sure where to look?
You know that this first gig probably won’t define you for the rest of your life, nor turn into a high-paying career that puts your wildest dreams within reach.
At the same time, you don’t want to waste your time in a job you actively despise. Nor do you want a role that won’t challenge you or teach you anything you can’t learn elsewhere.
Fortunately, plenty of entry-level jobs are both fun (most of the time) and challenging. These six are great if you’re eager to build practical skills that will serve you later in life — both personally and professionally — without diving headlong into a full-time career right away.
1. Graphic Design.
Internet entrepreneur Sky Dayton famously worked as an animation assistant before founding EarthLink, the dial-up company credited with bringing affordable internet access to the masses. While he never held another graphic design job, he credits the experience with teaching him the value of hard work and attention to detail.
The gig also pushed him out of his creative comfort zone, which may explain why he went on to found or invest in a variety of companies in the connectivity, mobile communication, and digital app spaces after leaving EarthLink.
Even if you don’t aspire to become an internet entrepreneur, graphic design and related creative jobs can help you test the bounds of your personal creativity and discover latent talents. In the end, you might decide creative work isn’t the best fit for you, but at least you’ll have learned something along the way.
2. Neighborhood Delivery.
Warren Buffett delivered newspapers around his neighborhood as a kid. Unlike most young newspaper delivery workers, he set aside enough of what he earned to fund his first stock market investments. The rest, as they say, is history.
The newspaper delivery business isn’t what it was when Buffett was a child, but there’s still room for enterprising young people in it. And there are other youth-friendly delivery gigs that teach similar skills, including some you can do on your bike or even on foot.
3. Supermarket/Retail Clerk.
Many career coaches believe every young person should hold at least one customer service job before they take their first career-track role. Customer service jobs like supermarket or department store checkout clerks teach countless fundamental skills that will serve you in just about any career you choose, including patience, interpersonal communication, conflict resolution, and basic goal-oriented planning and organization.
For better or worse, working in customer service will also show you lots of ways not to treat others. You’ll find yourself on the receiving end of rude or even abusive behavior more often than you’d prefer, but those experiences too will offer valuable lessons for the future.
4. Tutor.
Although personalized, AI-supported tutoring apps are steadily replacing human tutors, there’s still a place for peer-led tutoring and probably will be for a while yet. If you’re good at breaking down complicated concepts, you’d do well in this role. Many people who later go into teaching, research, and other academic roles credit their experience as high school or college tutors for pushing them along.
5. Youth Sports Official.
Like retail clerks, youth sports referees and umpires come in for more criticism than they deserve, most often from parents and coaches who take the game a bit too seriously. Still, this ever-popular job for young people is a wonderful way to learn basic values like following the rules and applying them fairly, along with important life skills like conflict resolution and effective communication.
6. Landscaping/Groundskeeping Assistant.
While landscapers and groundskeepers don’t interact closely with the general public, they often work in close-knit teams whose performance depends on how well they communicate and divide tasks internally. Accordingly, this type of gig is ideal for future leaders who want to master the basics of teamwork in professional settings and apply those lessons to future roles as supervisors, managers, and perhaps executives.
Don’t Let Your First Job Define You
Most “first jobs” are meant to be temporary, or at least not intended to progress into lengthy careers. Some make no secret of the fact that they’re designed for “up or out” trajectories: either you quickly move into positions of higher responsibility within the same organization, or you leave, voluntarily or otherwise.
It’s difficult for a job like that to define you as a worker, much less as a person. A few years from now, you might not even bother to include it on your CV anymore.
However, you’ll always have the memory of that first job, and the ones that come after. For your own benefit as a productive member of society, it’s important to use those memories — and what you learned on the job — to improve your performance at whatever comes next. At the same time, it’s important not to let those memories define you by “overlearning” those early lessons and getting too set in your ways.
After all, the workplace and the wider economy are changing fast. The workers most likely to succeed in the future are those who take the right lessons from the past.
