A summer job can teach young people more than any university lecture

Not because their lecturers were below par, but because the skills and experience they gain from their summer job could help their future careers more than any book they read, or essay they wrote, during term time.

Those graduating in the next few years will face a tough job market. Graduate vacancies have fallen by a third over the past year, and employers can take their pick of able candidates. Inevitably, they tend to favour grads who have both the ‘right’ degree and plenty of work experience.

And yet the proportion of students combining full-time education with a part-time job has halved since 2000. In part, this is because jobs have changed. Paper rounds are scarce now, and hospitality vacancies have halved over the past four years alone.

Fortunately, the retail sector still provides a first rung on the jobs ladder for tens of thousands of youngsters each year; the British Retail Consortium estimates that it accounts for nearly a quarter of youth employment.

Even though retailers’ rising costs have squeezed the number of entry-level vacancies, there’s a good chance that students returning home for summer will find a retail job near them. I’d urge them to grab it, not just for the money they’ll earn now, but also for the skills and lessons they’ll learn for the future.

Under-25s account for one in five counter staff in my business, which runs more than 300 Sainsbury’s Travel Money and No1 Currency outlets across the UK.

Face-to-face interactions are at the core of what we do, and it's a myth that years of doomscrolling have left Gen Zs too anxious or awkward to look people in the eye.

Ditto the lazy trope about younger workers being unreliable ‘snowflakes’; in my experience, they’re often extremely hard-working and excel at customer-facing roles.

All our younger staff take pride in serving their local community and gain satisfaction from learning to interact with all sorts of customers, on good days and bad.

Perhaps that’s why many stay with us for a long time. Among our under-25s, the average length of service is 18 months, and many have been with us for years - often picking up extra shifts during our busy summer months, which coincide with university holidays.

The interpersonal skills that young people, whether students or not, learn in jobs like this - speaking to customers and working as part of a team - will serve them well whatever career path they eventually take.

That’s why seasonal retail jobs remain vital to both the economy and thousands of students’ future employability.
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Simon Phillips is Managing Director of retail foreign exchange at Fexco, which owns Sainsbury’s Travel money and No1 Currency.

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