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Steph Briggs started her first part-time job as a retail assistant at a clothing store in Peterborough, eastern England. She opened and closed the shop, sold tops and trousers and — because this was the 1990s — checked for IRA bombs. Aged 16, she was taking on highly responsible roles: “I absolutely loved it.”
Briggs, who still remembers the pay was £2.50 an hour, says: “My mum was quite terrified that I was going to give up education and go and work in a shop floor for life.”
Yet the number of young people in the UK doing Saturday or after-school shifts has been falling since the time Briggs was enjoying her first taste of work. That means young adults are increasingly not “work ready”, former UK health secretary Alan Milburn, who is leading a government review into worklessness among young people, told The Times recently.
We asked Briggs and three other working women to reflect on their teenage experience of work in the 1990s.
All four say those stints taught them many skills that are now in danger of being lost. They worry, for instance, that increasing use of AI and time spent glued to mobile phone screens will harm how young adults learn and develop expertise for working life. Learning how to liaise with other people or managing different relationships and expectations as teenagers still helps them in their professional careers now.
Briggs later worked in McDonald’s and at a high-end jeweller, and then in a bar at university. Now a marketing consultant for retailers, she says those early experiences helped expand her abilities.
“The real key is learning those face-to-face customer skills. Digital natives now don’t have that opportunity in the same way my generation did to gain that real world selling experience,” she says. Employers do still value person-to-person experience, despite the increasing importance of online work, she adds.
It was not all fun. “I remember one particular store manager who was . . . let’s just say, quite exacting . . . It was probably my first proper lesson in personality dynamics.”
Retail experience also teaches taking responsibility, for yourself and for tasks, says Ruth Cooper-Dickson, whose Saturday job in a high street shoe shop was a 40 minute bus ride from home.
Being on time and helping with the cash tills at the end of the day were important lessons, she says, as was the ability to manage problems. “I experienced customers who weren’t happy, brought shoes back, it taught me early on that people are always different.”
Cooper-Dickson says the competitive spirit instilled was valuable later in her career, which included working for companies such as UBS Wealth Management and Rolls-Royce, before running a wellbeing consultancy.
Her manager printed out a list of the best-selling staff every Saturday, which created a “healthy competitive nature, with other people but also with yourself.” At that age, meeting and working with different people is important in shaping how you see the world beyond. Importantly, “they’re not your friendship group from school or college.”
When she had a larger consultancy, she had help with social media from a young assistant via a government work placement scheme. “Young people in school could be a great asset to businesses, especially given their savviness and knowledge of digital and social media,” she says.
Briggs and Cooper-Dickson worked for retail and hospitality companies, traditionally big hirers of young people part-time. But these sectors have been steadily cutting roles and hours, creating fewer starter jobs for teenagers.
The British Retail Consortium said in February that more than half its members predicted cuts to existing staff hours, while more than 60 per cent planned to increase automation.
Self-employed voiceover artist and live announcer Carla Terry also laments the decline in Saturday job options.
She started shifts around age 15 as a waiter in a tea room perched above a cliff on the Isle of Wight. “One of the biggest challenges was managing multiple tables at once,” she says. “I learned quickly how to stay calm under pressure, prioritise tasks effectively, and keep the service running smoothly.” Her strict boss’s example showed her how to manage the expectations of staff and customers speaking different languages and from various backgrounds.
“We need to get kids off phones and get them out there interacting with the real world,” says Terry. In the future, she “would absolutely” consider hiring someone still school-age: “Roles like this are hugely valuable in bridging the gap between school and the professional working world.”
Maggie Mattioni agrees. Her teenage job in a high-end fashion store exposed her to people she would not otherwise have spoken to, from top footballers to designers. “I was quite a shy child and it built up my confidence,” she says.
Now a fashion designer herself, the job “helped me with the career because you meet people, talk to people, see the clothes up close,” she says. “I don’t know anyone [young] who does a Saturday job now . . . It is a shame.”
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