College Students Stand Best Chance for Summer Job

It’s mid-June. School’s out. Now what?

For college students, the answer is almost anything.

Bolstered by a resurgent economy, the number of summer jobs and internships available to area college students is approaching pre-recession highs, job analysts said. And many positions are still unfilled.

Creative college students can finagle summer jobs, especially unpaid ones, in almost any field through perseverance and networking.

Internships “can be had at almost any time if students know how to go about it,” said Mary Williams, internship coordinator for Cal State Northridge.

For high school students, the job prospects are decidedly bleaker. Although government and private sector programs are expected to provide 19,000 summer jobs for Los Angeles youth this year, the demand for work is expected to be far greater, and it’s feared most students will walk away empty-handed. About 124,000 high school students are on summer vacation from the Los Angeles Unified School District alone.

Still, job counselors encourage teens to pound the pavement. With persistence and luck, they said, summer work can be found.

Lingering unemployment in Los Angeles County is the main reason for the disparity in job opportunities for secondary and college-level students, local analysts said. Jobs in the retail and service sectors--the traditional source of most summer jobs for teenagers--are being snatched up by the better educated and more experienced ranks of the unemployed, mainly because companies are out to maximize productivity.

“These people have better skills than a lot of students in high school, and retail chains are stressing better service,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County. “This is a hangover from our great economic restructuring. If you can get the best qualified workers at the lowest price, that’s what you’ll do. This puts high school students at a disadvantage.”

Higher up the education ladder, the story changes dramatically. Summer job opportunities for college students in Southern California have grown considerably over last year, said John Arany, a career counselor at Northridge. “The quality of jobs also seems to be up,” he said.

Jerry Houser, director of career services at USC, agrees. He said the number of summer positions available for college students this year has reached 1990-91 levels, down only slightly from the pre-recession peak the year before.

The influx is particularly welcome given the growing importance employers place on prior work experience when reviewing applications for full-time hires.

“For college students, summer jobs and internships have become vitally important for finding entry-level work after graduation,” Arany said. “In the ‘80s, it wasn’t as strong, but when the recession hit, it seems to me employers started demanding more.”

A June start may seem late for a summer job search, students often begin looking as early as January, but college career counselors said job offers, even for coveted positions, continue to pour into career offices well into midsummer.

“There is another wave of job hiring that happens later in the summer,” said Kathy Sims, director of the UCLA career center. To catch the surge, Sims advises students to check daily with their career offices or browse through their school’s job listings on the Internet.

Most local universities and colleges have an account with an Internet service called Jobtrak, a West Los Angeles-based company that posts job listings for post-secondary schools across the nation. Jobtrak, whose Internet address is https://www.jobtrak.com, receives about 2,100 new job offers a day, according to Chief Executive Ken Ramberg. About a quarter of those are summer jobs and internships. Although students can access job listings only for their specific schools, the Jobtrak Web site also features a comprehensive guide to other Internet job listings and resources available to any user.

Students who can’t find their ideal summer job in the career office shouldn’t despair, counselors said. There are a number of ways to pursue positions at businesses that haven’t formally posted them.

First, try networking.

Students should call on friends, family, acquaintances and faculty members for information about available jobs, Houser said. Even if those contacts have no leads, they may know someone who does.

Professional societies and associations also are a fertile territory for connections, Arany said.

Student Dave Gabler, a USC junior and business major, hopes to use networking to jump-start his summer job plans. He wants to be a freelance management consultant, a field he has studied at school.

“I’ll be a pretty cheap consultant, because I don’t have any experience,” he said. “Hopefully, I’ll gain some experience and some good references out of it, which’ll help me get a job next year.”

Among his contacts, Gabler hopes to hustle up work with a former schoolmate who heads a fledgling computer company in Orange County. He’ll also try his Morgan Hill, Calif., church confirmation sponsor who works for Smith Barney in Silicon Valley. And that’s just the beginning, Gabler said. “I got a whole folder full of business cards.”

If networking fails, there’s always the cold call--via telephone or in person.

To be successful, Houser recommends a student compile a wish list of prospective contacts, then research the businesses to demonstrate a genuine interest in joining the team, albeit temporarily.

Telephone calls are recommended if the target is a large corporation with no-nonsense receptionists and in-house security. Houser recalled one resourceful USC student who tracked down private telephone numbers for 10 company presidents and got job offers from five of them.

If the target is a small business, Houser recommends a personal visit with shoes shined and resume in hand. “Showing up at the door has been shown to be 15 to 20% more effective than the classifieds,” he said.

Students also can ask a mentor such as a career counselor or faculty member to make cold calls on their behalf, Williams said. That way, prospective employers “know this is a serious pursuit and that we take the student seriously,” she said.

Williams also arranges “information meeting” to acquaint students and employers. “Sometimes when the chemistry is good, the student will walk out with something,” she said.

Despite good intentions and even better efforts, some students may not find a summer job in their field of interest. At that point, Arany suggests they pursue a fall internship in conjunction with classes or even in place of them if college credit is offered.

If a summer job “doesn’t fall into exactly the time frame you would like, you should still continue to look but just push your time frame forward,” he said.

Apparently no amount of time-frame pushing will help the majority of local high school students land summer jobs this year. While commendable, public and private sector jobs programs are expected to barely scratch the surface of the need.

On the public side, the $17.4-million congressional outlay for the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program is expected to provide only 14,000 summer jobs, which are reserved for Los Angeles residents living in poverty and are mainly positions in public offices and institutions.

Marian Aguilar directs the city’s program, which is the largest of 52 similar efforts statewide. Although she expects to get 30,000 applications or more than twice the available, Aguilar said some positions could still be open by late June. The jobs begin July 15, and students can apply for them at any of 14 state Employment Development Department offices in the region. Locations are listed in the telephone book. Applicants must be between 14 and 21 years old and able to prove city residency, family income and eligibility to work in the United States.

On the private side, the L.A. Youth at Work program, run jointly by the city and the Los Angeles Private Industry Council, hopes to round up 5,000 summer jobs in the private sector.

Launched last year, the program encourages area businesses to make jobs available for youth between the ages of 16 and 21. It has no city residency or family income requirements but applicants must be eligible to work in this country.

By mid-spring, at least 2,000 young people had gone through the program’s mandatory orientation, which attempts to teach teens how to prepare for and survive in the job world.

L.A. Youth at Work officials hope to place those students and more in temporary full-time positions. Unfortunately, as of mid-May, job pledges from local businesses totaled just 685, even though more than 5,000 business had been targeted in outreach efforts this year alone.

“We need more employers willing to step up to the plate,” said Deborah Beavers, administrator for the Private Industry Council.

The program begins July 1, and students interested in participating must attend an orientation. The next one will be held June 22 at Santa Monica High School in Santa Monica. Admission vouchers, which are required to attend, can be picked up at EDD offices.

For the majority of students who will not get jobs under either program, high school job counselors said there is always a fallback: pounding the pavement. Unfortunately, those same counselors said there just aren’t that many opportunities in either poor communities or affluent ones.

As soon as the relatively few jobs available in fast-food restaurants are snatched up, there is very little left in economically depressed south Los Angeles, said Cecile Graykal, job counselor at Jefferson High School. Graykal, in fact, encourages her students to travel outside the neighborhood to find work.

But job counselor Fred Von Dohlen of Hamilton High School in West Los Angeles said job prospects in his neighborhood are also tight. “We have not seen a lot of openings in terms of summer employment in retail or that sort of thing,” he said.

His office gets between three and five local job postings a week, but the number of students who stop by each week looking for work is more than 10 times that, Von Dohlen said.

Still, he advises students not to give up.

“They have to get out there and network and see what’s around. They need to go to the personnel offices at the malls and see what’s available,” he said. “If I was a student, I’d be out there every weekend looking for a job.”