So maybe you don’t want to be a lifeguard forever. Perhaps hostess and cashier gigs aren’t part of your five-year plan. That doesn’t mean you should slack off. If you do the best you can at these short-term jobs, the experience and connections you gain will likely help in your long-term career.
Whether you’re a student, recent graduate or someone who’s simply raking in extra cash this summer, here’s why you should take that seasonal job seriously and how to make the most of it:
The Why
You gain new skills and real-world experience. “It takes more than a degree to be employable when you graduate,” says Debbie Kaylor, director of the Career Center at Boise State University in Idaho. “When employers are recruiting and interviewing, they’re looking for the whole package.” That package includes skills and experience you’re unlikely to gain in college alone, she says, but that you could pick up in a summer job, where “you’re learning initiative, time management, integrity, teamwork and communication skills.” And yes, she adds, that goes for slinging iced coffees at a cafe, taking tickets at an amusement park and completing other tasks seemingly unrelated to your long-term career. Even in those roles, you’re practicing your professional interactions with supervisors and customers, solving problems — the cash register is on the fritz! — managing time to complete your duties, working in a team of co-workers and so on.
In a 2014 Forbes article titled ” The Two Key Traits Employers Need From Today’s College Graduates,” guess what the two traits are? Effective communication skills and real-world critical thinking skills. By practicing both this summer, you’re already distinguishing yourself from the candidates you’ll compete against for long-term employment. (Those are the folks splashing in the pool as you sell refreshments at the cabana.) As Robert Farrington, author of that Forbes article summarizes: “No matter how high your GPA, or whether you graduated with honors, if you can’t communicate clearly in an interview and demonstrate that you can solve a real world business problem, employers will not want to hire you.”
You can network. “When you’re working at a coffee shop, who’s going there every morning? Local professionals who are heading out to the community to their jobs,” Kaylor says. At the pool, you interact with neighbors. At the amusement park: parents. At the restaurant: locals. “If you make a good impression on those people, they’re going to remember that and be part of your network when you go out and look for other jobs,” Kaylor says.
You secure references. Do a good job, and those supervisors and co-workers today can praise your work to potential employers later.
The How
Work harder than everyone else. “If you can step it up a little bit, you can really make an impact on the organization and what people think of you,” Kaylor says. At the most basic level, this means wearing the proper attire every day and, according to brand marketing leader and former U.S. News blogger Tim Tyrell-Smith, arriving early and staying late. Doing so “will help you pass the first-impression test with your bosses and co-workers,” he says in this blog post about turning a summer job into a full-time gig. Plus, “[I]t makes you look hungry for the job and is an obvious way to show off your interest,” he writes.
Perform your duties the best you can, which means ditching your phone when you’re on the clock and being “present at what you’re doing,” Kaylor says. Instead of eyeing your Instagram feed, observe your work environment to “identify areas of improvement and to suggest changes,” she says. This may be as simple as cleaning your work area, or it could be as forward-thinking as proposing a way to streamline hostess duties at your restaurant or boost employee engagement at your pool by creating a co-worker softball team. “Summer jobs are great opportunities to take initiative,” she adds.
Connect with regulars. Remember the repeat patrons of your coffee shop, pool and restaurant mentioned above? Get to know them, and in turn, let them learn about you. No one is suggesting a “Can I take your order and also have a salaried job at your company?” approach. However, if you hit it off with regulars who ask about you, Kaylor suggests opening with lines like: “I’m a marketing major at XYZ University.” Or: “I’m excited to try my hand at public relations.” Then, as you wrap up your seasonal work, Kaylor advises asking these patrons for their contact information so you can add them to your network.
Ask your boss for feedback and references. There’s unlikely to be a performance review planned for a three-month job, so Kaylor suggests requesting one. In the review, ask your manager about what you did well on the job and in which areas you can improve, Kaylor says, and ask for feedback on specific skills, such as communication and teamwork. With this assessment, “you have something to think about and something to work toward in your next job,” she says.
If the manager was pleased with your work, see if she would be your reference, and log her job titles and contact information. You can do the same for co-workers, too. However, when you plan to use them in the future, “contact those references in advance to let them know what’s going on,” Kaylor says. “You don’t want them to be blindsided.”
Get an outside perspective so you can build your professional story. Soon after you finish your summer job, Kaylor suggests meeting with someone from your university’s career services center, a parent or a mentor to hash out what exactly you did that summer and how to convey your valued contributions to future employers. Otherwise, if you just throw “pool attendee” or “hostess at restaurant” on your résumé without debriefing, you’ll undersell the experience and likely forget about the suggestions you proposed, connections you made and initiatives you took when you need to describe the experience in a future interview. “Having someone else on the outside looking in changes the perspective,” Kaylor says, because he or she can ask questions and prompt you to look more closely at what you achieved. How did the co-worker softball team you created affect employee engagement, for example, or what was the result of the streamlined hostess duties you proposed? Log these results in your running résumé, she says, and shape the experiences into a narrative.
“Think about what employers are interested in from that experience, and figure out how to articulate that,” she says. “Create a compelling story to help them understand what those transferable skills are.”
More from U.S. News
10 Part-Time Jobs to Help Pay the Bills
10 Things New Grads Can Do Right Now to Get a Job
Why You Should Take That Summer Job Seriously originally appeared on usnews.com