Students all over the country have jobs after school or on the weekends, however as of 2012 only 16% of high schoolers have jobs. While this is mostly due to the difficulty that there is in people in general obtaining a job in the first place, the fact that fewer and fewer students are being exposed to jobs early on is denying them the skills and values people learn at the workplace. It is important that high school students have an equal opportunity to get a job as everyone else.

High school is all about preparing students for college and going into the career they want. However, many graduates often face the issue of not having the experience for the field they’re going into—or any experience at all—which can leave them ineligible for the position. Regardless of how well someone can do in high school and college, sometimes that is just not enough. This is why many businesses prefer to hire older people who already have the experience needed to excel in that job, which can steal those opportunities from the younger generations to get the same job.

As students grow older, the expenses they have grow with them. To put it simply, being a teenager can be expensive, especially if one’s parents insist that they pay for everything themselves: phone bills, gas, new clothes, and anything else they might want. It is practically impossible to live off the money one gets from babysitting, or other things one can do around their neighborhood. While students have jobs they begin to mature and develop into young adults and begin to understand how to manage their money, and without the opportunity to be taken seriously during an interview and have a job they won’t go into the real world without that knowledge under their belt.

Being exposed to a work environment often helps people develop skills that can also be applied to school. The dedication and hard work that maintaining a stable job takes easily translates to focus in the classroom. Having a job forces people to understand how to manage their time efficiently as well as knowing how to be productive.

While all of these things may prove why a student should be interested in getting a job, the problem still remains that employers prefer to hire already experienced and often times older people. This is what drags those that are interested in applying for a job after school down and makes them unable to have that experience.

However, if employers would have a “blind” interview and disregard the fact that high schoolers may not have experience in the field previously, they will realize that they have just as much potential as those older people that are applying. This would offer everyone a fair and fighting chance, and students would be able to reap the benefits of having a job.

Students profit from the experiences that having a job offer them, whether it be a steady cash flow, a good resume, or simply the responsibility they learn while working for the first time. While it would require cooperation on the employers’ part, the best outcome would be if teenagers and the older population had equal opportunities to obtain a job.