This summer, my sixteen-year-old son went looking for a job. He filled out applications, interviewed with several employers, followed up, and did most of the things we tell young people they are supposed to do. The answer, more often than not, was the same: employers wanted someone who could keep working daytime hours once school started.
He’ll be fine. Instead of spending the summer behind a counter or working a drive-through, he completed ground school as he works toward becoming a pilot, mowed a few lawns, spent time with friends and, if I’m being completely honest, played more video games than I would have preferred.
What stayed with me was that his experience wasn’t unusual. I kept hearing similar stories from other parents. Responsible teenagers who genuinely wanted to work were applying, interviewing and getting nowhere.
At first, I chalked it up to a difficult hiring season. Then I looked at the data.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 71.8 percent of American teenagers held jobs during the summer of 1978. Today, the share is roughly one in three. The decline happened gradually, over decades, which may be why it has been easy to miss.
But the more interesting question isn’t why teen employment fell. There are plenty of forces at work: changing retail and restaurant business models, e-commerce, self-checkout, digital ordering, tighter scheduling practices and a hiring process that increasingly runs through online systems. Research from Lightcast has also documented employers asking for previous experience in jobs that have traditionally been considered entry level.
That creates an obvious problem: How do you get experience when the jobs that used to provide it increasingly expect you to already have it?
That’s when I realized I had been asking the wrong question. The question wasn’t why my son couldn’t find a summer job. The question was: What happened to the first job itself?
For most of the twentieth century, the American summer job was more than a way for teenagers to earn spending money. In many respects, it was one of the largest workforce development programs in the country.
No legislation created it. No grant funded it. No performance measures tracked it. Every summer, millions of young people learned how to show up on time, deal with customers, work alongside people they didn’t choose, take feedback, solve small problems and earn the trust of an employer. We didn’t call it work-based learning. It was simply work.
That distinction matters because we spend a great deal of time today talking about talent shortages, career pathways and work-based learning. At the same time, one of the most common entry points into the talent pipeline has quietly become less accessible.
This isn’t an argument for recreating the labor market of 1978. We can’t, and we shouldn’t. Technology has changed how businesses operate. Consumer behavior has changed. Employers are under pressure to schedule efficiently and hire people who can contribute quickly.
But if the labor market no longer produces first-job experiences at the scale it once did, we should be asking a much more important question: What replaces them?
A few weeks ago, at NAWB’s Board of Directors meeting, I learned more about Grow Detroit’s Young Talent, a summer employment initiative that places more than 8,000 young people into paid work experiences each year. What struck me wasn’t just the scale. It was the philosophy behind it. Detroit isn’t waiting for the labor market to recreate opportunities that used to happen naturally. The community has decided to build them intentionally.
I think there is a lesson in that for workforce development.
Summer employment programs, youth apprenticeships, paid internships, career-connected learning and other work-based learning experiences shouldn’t be treated as nice-to-have youth programming. They are modern entry points into the labor market. They give young people a place to develop the habits and confidence employers later say they want.
That also means employers have to be part of the solution. It is difficult to reconcile persistent complaints about a lack of experienced workers with hiring practices that make it harder for inexperienced workers to get their first chance. If employers want a stronger future talent pool, somebody has to give tomorrow’s experienced workers their first experience.
This is where workforce boards can play a different role. We have traditionally been very good at helping people connect to jobs, navigate career transitions and respond to layoffs. Those responsibilities remain essential. But there is another role available to us: helping communities build the first rungs of the ladder when the market is no longer creating enough of them on its own.
My son’s summer also reminded me of something else. He didn’t get a job, but he had alternatives. He could pursue aviation training. He had yard work to do, college visits to prepare for, spent a ton of time learning Japanese on one of those language apps and other ways to spend his summer productively.
Not every teenager has those options.
For a young person without the same resources or networks, losing access to a first job may mean losing one of the few places where an adult outside the family gives them responsibility, expects something of them and shows them what work actually feels like. That makes this more than a nostalgic story about teenagers and summer vacations. It is also a story about access and opportunity.
I think three shifts are worth considering.
First, treat early work experience as workforce infrastructure. The question shouldn’t simply be whether a community has youth programs. It should be whether young people have meaningful opportunities to experience work before we expect them to build a career.
Second, change the employer value proposition. Hiring a young person should not be framed only as community service. It is a long-term talent strategy. Employers that want reliable, experienced workers tomorrow have a role in developing them today. Yes, AI and automation maybe less costly in the short run, but in the long run, may end up costing much more when the talent doesn’t exist to run your business.
Third, build what the market no longer produces naturally. Workforce boards, schools, employers, chambers, community colleges and community organizations can create paid work experiences, apprenticeships and other first-job opportunities at a scale that individual institutions cannot achieve alone.
The first job has never been just about the first paycheck. It is where many of us first learned that showing up matters, that customers are sometimes difficult, that coworkers become friends and that responsibility has a way of building confidence.
We have spent years talking about strengthening America’s talent pipeline. Maybe one of the most important things we can do is pay more attention to where that pipeline actually begins.
The labor market may no longer open that first door as often as it once did. That doesn’t mean we should accept a generation growing up with fewer chances to walk through it.
Member Portal