Why a Teenage Bank Teller May Have the Best Summer Job

Everyone should work as a bank teller at least once in their lives.

When I first heard Jill Matson utter that sentence in front of a roomful of high school students last year, I instantly felt jealous of every teenager who had managed to land a summer job counting cash, sniffing out counterfeit checks and sorting out financial messes.

“Tellers are like bartenders,” said Ms. Matson, the member services and employee development manager for General Electric Credit Union in Cincinnati. “People will tell you anything.”

It’s a rare summer job that combines the acquisition of intensely practical knowledge and the opportunity to have conversations about important and personal topics with people two or three times your age. Then again, summer employment itself is at a record low, with fewer than a third of American teenagers in traditional paid employment last summer.

Plenty of high school and college students do not have jobs because they cannot find any. High school students, in particular, often pursue academic enrichment or take unpaid internships in the hopes that those efforts will appear more prestigious to college admissions officers than any paid employment they may qualify for.

See full content here - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/your-money/why-your-teenagers-summer-job-should-be-bank-teller.html