To think retail and fast food jobs teach you more life skills than school ever did?

[FrontTillPHD]

People love to look down on retail, hospitality or fast food work, like it’s something you “grow out of” or leave behind once you get a “real job.” But honestly I think those jobs teach you resilience.

You learn how to stay calm under pressure, how to handle difficult people, how to read the room, how to speak clearly and how to meet people’s needs, fast. You don’t get that from sitting in a classroom or even from some fancy office job where you don’t deal with the public.

If you’ve done any customer-facing job, you know. There’s a toughness, a people-sense and a work ethic that gets built in, and it stays with you.

AIBU to think we don’t give enough credit to how much you grow in those kinds of jobs?

We want our schools to do too much these days. They aren’t there to teach ‘life skills’ - that’s what, errr, ‘life’ should do.

However, I agree that retail and hospitality jobs are invaluable for young people - including those wanting to pursue further and higher ed and who have career aspirations elsewhere. There are two problems:

1. Many school sixth form leaders actively discourage pupils from taking on part time jobs.They see the negative effects on grades as outweighing the positives.

2. These jobs aren’t that easy to come by now - especially for 18 year-olds with a higher minimum wage and given the NI changes that kicked in this April.

Hopefully the job market will improve, but I don’t think it will any time soon.

I totally agree. I've worked in retail and an office job (no idea if it's 'fancy' or not) and have taken things and learnt valuable skills from each role.

What makes an office job 'fancy', OP?

To be fair, school is only one part of learning, your parents and family are the other. So if school didn’t achieve it, why didn’t your parents?

I completely agree ..just a shame it's so difficult for youngsters to get part time jobs now. Unless you know someone or have a connection, it's really hard.

No, I believe that these type of jobs are an addition to what was taught at school.

I started my first part time job at 16 in a restaurant & then moved to work in a supermarket
As a student, I also worked during the holidays as;
Hospital & large venue cleaning
Kitchen & large venue catering
Car park attendance at large venue (money)
Factory work

When I started work, I met a wider group of people from different countries & back grounds than I had met before.
The jobs taught me about money management, honesty, attention to detail, busy hot working environments, how to have a sense of humour, how other people live & work

I honestly believe my daughter will get more out of working at the local pub once a week than some of the stuff she does on her degree course.

But all what you have listed can be done in roles that aren’t customer facing

Quite. Pretty infuriating anti-academic thinking, which is heading straight for annexation by the more bellicose and eagerly outraged of social commentators out there.

I agree completely. I did a lot of bar work when I was a student and it was a brilliant crash course in how to get on with adults of all ages & from very different backgrounds to my own.

One place I worked was very popular with young professionals; lawyers, management consultants etc. Many of them were obviously privately educated, and they looked & sounded completely different to people from my own very working class home town. I quickly realised that despite their privileged upbringing & posh accents, they weren’t any more intelligent than me so I could do those sort of jobs, too.

Yep bigger narcissistic twats to deal with.

I think most jobs teach you resilience and life skills. They are challenging or engaging in their own ways. 12 years teaching 13-18 year olds has made me [I hope] a lot more resilient, patient, quick thinking] than I was in my 20's. I'm 34 now.

School is also nothing like what it was in my time. Our students do so much now in terms of activities and sports. It's not just academia. There's a huge amount of liason with the local community as well. I think this thread makes time in school another scape goat for peoples lack of resilience. Resilience can come from many disciplines, not just hospitality. I also think the use of "fancy office" is silly. It doesn't make those jobs any easier.

But where do people learn the skills to get the first job in retail in the first place?

More than school? What you learn on the shop floor doesn’t have any relation to what you learn at school. Should we just forget school and ship everyone off to Tesco at 13 like the good old days?!

I worked in shops and hospitality part time
from 13-23. To be honest, I was anxious and nervous the whole time. I was put in some dangerous situations without adult support, and i defaulted to people pleasing including breaking rules to avoid conflict with aggressive customers.

I can’t actually reflect on any useful learnings tbh. Your post assumes it had a long term
positive impact on people

Hmm

In my job you need to be incredibly fast at maths, reading and writing eloquently and clearly on technical matters and make quick decisions regarding very complex matters. While i think a typical retail role has huge value, i needed a lot academic skills to get where i am.

Schools and jobs teach entirely different skills but the skills needed to get on within jobs are needed to be taught by parents. Work ethic, punctuality, hygiene ime are lacking in a lot of young people.

What I hate even more is the referencing to retail etc as 'entry level', when actually what people mean is essential but shit pay, conditions and management structures.

I think hospitality and fast food jobs in particular are looked down upon by society as a whole but they can be a massive stepping stone to other things. My daughter started a part time job at McDonalds aged 16. They offered her management training - which I might add that involves taking some pretty stiff exams that are administered by an exam board. She gradually worked her way up and ended up being people manager for a franchisee who had over 10 stores. She worked there for 20 years in the end and that experience enabled her to move on to a top university where she is a HR professional and she’s now doing her CIPD qualifications. She’s amazing with people generally and has loads of friends. People widely mocked her for working at McDs and laughed at her for being a burger flipper when she was not only getting vital life skills and experience, she was earning good money and the knowledge she gained got her the job she loves now.

Absolutely. Totally right. I’ve spent ten years working in a shoe shop combined with a sideline of barmaiding and waitressing. And then the university teaching… the two former taught me how to deal with 20 years of the latter. Irreplaceable

Because, with respect, school is there not there to do everything for you. Nor is your employer,

Parents should do that. We can’t blame schools for not doing what feckless parents should be doing. Like teaching their kids life skills.

Absolutely. I recruit into high demand Graduate positions and anyone without retail/hospitality work experience doesn't make the cut for interview.

You’re not comparing like with like. Both are extremely valuable for different, almost opposite, reasons.

Jobs you have described teach an excellent lesson in discipline, focus, resilience and people savvy. Which is very useful when you are starting out. I think everyone should do a job like this.

School teaches you intellectual curiosity and independence which jobs in retail and hospitality, by and large, try to knock out of you.

I think a well rounded person needs both: I think the real life skills of retail or hospitality are invaluable but they won’t teach you the kind of critical thinking you would need for some roles.

Not really. I worked in various supermarkets and high street shops for years and to be totally honest I think people like to exaggerate how difficult it is.

skills learned in school and later university were more useful than those learned at work in those fields, for me.

Jobs like that for ten years or so were stressful and hard, physical work. I did learn a lot, much of it good and confidence building, some unpleasant. Mainly the pressure from managers to work many more hours than contracted for, not to take any time off. I didn’t realise then - until many years later - that I had a little power in the situations and could have stood up for myself on some things and kept the jobs.

I was highly motivated to get an office job, then a better office job!

Schools can't teach everything.

How can school possibly teach the skills acquired as an adult through living life and engaging with the adult world? To children?

My children both developed as people a huge amount through having part time jobs in retail and hospitality whilst they studied. They then went on and developed a huge amount again through university.

But they wouldn't even have got those jobs in the first place or kept them if they hadn't had the foundation of skills they'd learnt at school - ability to communicate, perseverance, resilience, time keeping, personal responsibility, negotiation etc to build upon.

The problem lies in assuming the role of school is to deliver fully formed adults at the end of their learning journey.

Only an idiot would think that school teaches you everything you'll ever need to know in life.

a friend who is a retail manager regularly regales us with tales of his junior staff, who are often working while in 6th form or before heading off to uni, and how unused they are to work….and how changed they are by the time they leave….

I agree op that my gap year working in retail was far more useful that university for helping me with my career and also with my shyness and confidence at the time.