First High School Jobs

The first job a teenager gets provides a great learning experience for the rest of their career. Getting started early is important and can build characters and helpful skills that can last a lifetime.

Although it is completely fine to wait to work until later in life, getting started early in your career, even if it is only part time, can lead to skills that can be used later on in life.
The obvious trade off is that you must begin to transition out of being a kid a little bit earlier in life, but for some individuals, this is exactly what they want.
The first and most obvious benefit of starting to work in high school is that it begins to build a resume, which can put you ahead of your peers later on in life.
Although by itself a summer at a restaurant or part time at a golf course won't put you ahead of anyone.
It will give you a half step on your competition.
Second, it begins to teach the true value of money.
It is very easy to spend money when it is not yours or being given to you for meaningless or made up tasks.

As soon as a dollar that is being spent must be earned, perspective can change greatly. This is a realization and lesson that is best learned earlier, as lack of this knowledge can begin to create a snowball effect of poor spending decisions that can appear later in life.

The next major skill is beginning to understand how to act in a professional setting.

Although this may seem self explanatory, this tid bit of real world experience is one that must be learned to function in the adult world.
Getting a taste of this early and beginning to calibrate expectations and actions around other working adults is a skill that will last a life time, and in early interviews in college, can actually separate one from their peers.

Developing a professional persona, appearance, and demeanor can only do positive things for those on professional career paths. Lastly, but not least, seeing first hand how others manage can only help later on in life.

Whether your first manager is great or terrible, seeing and experiencing first hand how a managers style can affect you is something that you will carry for the rest of your life and can hopefully make you a better employee and individual manager later on.