Get a service industry job if you can

My first jobs were all connected to food and food service. My first job, when I’d just graduated high school and was saving up money for college, was washing dishes at Pizza Inn. My first two years of college I had a job at the campus snack bar, mostly doing food prep like cutting tomatoes and lettuce for burgers but also working the cash register. My junior year I got a job waiting tables, and I continued to wait tables at a few restaurants while I finished my degree, went back to school for teacher training, and as a second job my first few years of teaching.

A month or so ago I had a meeting with a man who has a career-coaching start-up. At some point in the conversation, he said it was working as a waiter that turned him from a shy introvert to someone who knew how to talk to people. He was then able to go on to have a career in law and consulting. I told him that I had the same experience; I’m still a shy introvert, but most everything I learned about working with people I learned from waiting tables for seven years. I can’t imagine I could have been a successful high school teacher without the practice I got as a server.

So I want to pass on this advice to high school students and even college students: forget about a fancy internship for now and get a job in the service industry. There’s a lot of pressure to get some kind of job within your chosen field, to work with people in your chosen field, and to have a job history within your chosen field as soon as possible. I understand that pressure and don’t necessarily disagree, but if you plan to ever work with other people, then you can’t go wrong getting some experience in a service job. It doesn’t matter whether it's waiting tables, working in a coffee shop, delivering pizzas, or working retail. Any job that puts you face-to-face with people, all day long, will teach you more than you expect. In an internship you may interact with the same dozen people every day. In a service job, you interact with dozens or hundreds of different people every day. There’s just a much bigger pool of experiences to draw from. A lot of the people I know with impressive-sounding job titles like CEO and law firm partner got their start working at fast food places or retail jobs. It teaches you a lot.

Service jobs teach you how to interact with people. In school, you practice talking in class or giving presentations. It’s a highly regulated and specialized environment. In the service industry you learn how to work with all kinds of environments. You learn how to speak with strangers. You learn how to “read” a customer’s mood—are they in a rush, are they having a bad day, are they joking, are they desperately trying to impress the person they’re with? You get better at understanding people just by watching them.

In a way, all careers are built on the same foundation: you collect information, you look for patterns, and you use the patterns to make predictions and act on them. Service jobs give you a fast-paced, real-life training ground. You’ll start noticing how different people react to the same situation. You’ll learn how small changes in what you say or do can make people respond better. And you get instant feedback. If you're kind, efficient, and helpful, people tip more. If you mess up, they complain. The results are immediate and measurable.

Service jobs give you practice solving problems quickly. In a restaurant, problems come at you fast. Someone's order is wrong. A drink gets spilled. A customer is angry because they had to wait. And you can't say, "let me learn more and get back to you next week." You can’t hide behind email. You can’t contemplate. You have to deal with it, so you learn on your feet. You figure out when to fix something yourself, when to ask for help, when to apologize even if you weren’t at fault just to make things smoother (that’s a hard one), and when to find a manager or expert because you’re out of your depth. That kind of fast, flexible thinking is useful in any job. Later, when you're in a meeting, or leading a team, or applying for a job, you’ll already be used to handling problems calmly and creatively.

Service jobs give you practice understanding the big picture. Service industry jobs—especially in small businesses—teach you about every layer of a team. In a small restaurant I worked in a space of maybe 5,000 square feet. And in that space, I regularly interacted with a dishwasher from a small town working his first job, cooks who were older than me and who had worked in kitchens all over the city, other college students looking for a way to pay their tuition, older professional servers who had worked in big hotels and trained most of the new hires, managers with business degrees, and the self-made businessman owner. Not to mention the customers. In an office job, you might never meet the people who clean the building or the ones who make big financial decisions. But in a small business, you might talk to everyone in a single shift. You hear stories, learn how decisions are made, and see how every role supports the others. That kind of exposure is incredibly valuable.

Can I give any specific examples of something I learned from waiting tables that was really helpful in other situations? Sure. Let me give two of the biggest lessons that I’ve kept with me for the decades since I moved on from waiting tables.

One afternoon a customer asked if we had something. I don’t remember what it was, but it was something we didn’t have, so I said “no, we don’t have that.” My boss overheard the conversation, and at the end of the shift he brought it up. He told me “when someone asks for something, never say no. If it’s for something you can’t do, say ‘let me see what I can do’ and then come back with some kind of offer. If you have multiple things to offer, they feel like they’re getting luxury instead of feeling like they didn’t get something.” This is basic Negotiating 101. Find a win-win, look for common ground, think outside the box, stuff like that. But “don’t say no, say let me see what I can do” is how I learned it. It means that you stay helpful, that you look for options, that you try. This approach makes you someone that people want to work with. It makes you think about possibility, and it makes you think about your own agency and power, even when you’re in a situation where you have little. Does it always work? Of course not. As a teacher I had students, parents, and administrators ask for things I couldn’t give them. I would find some kind of counter-offer, ideally several, and they still weren’t satisfied. But even in those cases the narrative shifted from “You asked for something and I chose not to give it to me” to “You asked for something and you chose not to take any of what I offered you.”

Another thing I learned over time working in food service is that people like charm, but they respect discipline. Being friendly is important, but being reliable matters more. I worked with plenty of people who were more charismatic than I am—most people are. But being good with people and having natural leadership instincts still don’t get you very far if you don’t also have self-discipline. Being fun and charming might help you get the job, but you’ll lose the job soon if you’re also flaky. Show up on time. Do your part. Be consistent. Learn as much as you can. Over time, that earns real respect—and bigger opportunities.

Service jobs may not sound glamorous or like the right path to the kind of career you aspire to. But they’re some of the best places to learn how to be a capable, confident person. It might not be the most “impressive” line on your résumé, but it’ll shape who you are in a way that can impress most anyone.

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More about community service

Most students understand, or at least have heard, that performing community service is something you should do in preparation for applying to colleges. But why? What do colleges care if you’ve served? Is it just another arbitrary hoop for you to jump through, a sort of weeding-out process? Do they actually believe that simply performing some community service will make you a “good person”? And what kind of community service should you do?

At the most basic level, colleges are interested in how you serve your community because they are going to be your community, and they want to know how you might fit in. They want, to paraphrase President Kennedy, people who will not just ask what their community can do for them, but what they can do for their community. And because how people behave in college usually looks a lot like how they behave in high school, asking about your service to others while you were in high school is a simple way for them to gauge how you may serve others when you’re in their college community. It’s important that everyone, no matter how wealthy or challenged in terms of time, money, or talents, finds a way to give as well as receive, and so community service is something you should plan on while in high school.

For high school students approaching community service, there are two main categories: the simple route, and the creative route. You’ll probably do things that fall into both categories, though most of your energy may be in one or the other.

The simple route is where “community service hours” come in. The simple route is to work at events that are recruiting volunteers and to keep track of the quantity of your service. This includes working car washes, helping to staff community events or fund-raisers, volunteering at food banks or nursing homes, or any sort of event where you are serving someone else’s organization. This route is popular, because it doesn’t necessarily involve much time or effort outside of the volunteer event itself, because it has set times and tasks, and because a sponsor or other authority can easily vouch for the hours that you spent helping.

The simple route isn’t necessarily easy—in fact it rarely is. But it’s usually pretty straightforward, simple to do, and simple to explain. Your school may have a volunteering club or honor society that essentially works to match events with volunteers.

The drawback to the simple route is that it’s easy for others to look at it cynically. If you can show that you’ve worked many hours in a seemingly random assortment of events that aren’t connected to each other, then it’s easy for college admission committees—or anyone else—to wonder if you really do care about the community, or if you’re just doing these things to “get the hours” and check it off your list. If you work 300 volunteer hours but people don’t believe you really care, then those hours—while useful to those you served—may not get you much in terms of college acceptance.

The creative route is one where, instead of working for someone else's organization, you create the organization that other people work for. This can look like different things: taking over leadership of an existing club at school, starting a new club at school, getting a grant from an organization to run your own project, or even starting your own non-profit organization. Like the simple route, the creative route is rarely easy. Plus, it may be more difficult to get documentation from a credible authority of the work you put into it. The creative route may produce higher quality service sometimes, but it doesn’t have the easy-to-read and easy-to-understand hour log signed by a sponsor that the simple route does. However, the creative route does tend to provide more autonomy and a larger sense of accomplishment. Interestingly, this route can often give you a greater sense of accomplishment even if you are unable to accomplish your goal. That’s because of the more intense problem solving that comes with these kinds of endeavors.

Remember, though, that it’s also easy for colleges and others to look on this kind of community service cynically. Most of the student-founded nonprofits I hear about are tackling problems that other organizations already exist to address, and they usually fall apart as soon as the student goes off to college. People aren’t going to assume you’re doing great things just because you start a club or organization—some will assume you’re just doing it for your own resume.

We obviously need both kinds of community service, and most people do both. There’s nothing wrong with taking the simple route. Be honest with yourself about your motives, your strengths, and your limitations. Remember that to a large degree it’s not as important what you do but how you explain it. There’s also nothing wrong with the creative route. But again, be honest with yourself and be able to explain your choices.

Here’s a process for getting into community service or revamping your current strategy. It’s not a linear process that you do once in order. It’s more of a cycle that you’ll go through over and over throughout your life, not just as a high school student.

1. Think about why you are interested in community service. Be honest with yourself. You likely don’t have a single motive, and you need to understand your overlapping motives. This will give you and the people you’re helping a greater chance of success. Are you performing community service because you are required to complete a certain number of hours for an honor society, your school, or some other organization? Is community service an avenue for you to show gratitude for your own good fortune? Is it a social opportunity for you to spend more time with friends completing projects together? Do you have political or religious ideals, and you want to find ways to put them into action? Are you lonely and looking for ways to be around other people? Understanding the reasons why you want to get involved at all will help you decide what kind of service is best. There are no wrong answers.

2. Define your communities. You’ll be more successful if you approach community service thinking about serving your own communities. These overlapping communities can be geographic—neighborhood, town or city, state, nation. They can be social, political, religious,, and special interest communities. We often think of service in terms of helping other communities, not our own. In some senses this is true, of course, but your service is going to be of higher quality when you think about how you are a part of the community. You may not be in the hospital, but when you volunteer at the hospital you’re helping to strengthen people within your community, and you’re therefore strengthening your own community. The less you think of the people you serve as other, the more useful the service will be to them and for yourself.

3. Who needs help in those communities? Some of these are obvious. The hungry, homeless, and sick in your community need help. People who cannot, for whatever reasons, live independently need help. But lots of people need all kinds of help. When you define your communities more broadly to include not just neighborhood and school, but also your social groups, hobbies and passions, you’ll find more people who can use help and more types of help to give.

4. Who is already helping in those communities? Whatever the problem is you’d like to tackle, it’s not a new one. And there are already people, many of them experts, already working on that problem. Seek them out. Ask how you can help. Learn from them as you help them. Make starting something new from scratch a last-resort idea, not your first idea. The people and groups working to help that part of your community will eventually become another of your communities.

5. How can you contribute? How would you like to help? What have you got that you can contribute to helping? Time and labor? Knowledge and expertise? Materials and supplies? Social connections? Think of all the things you can do to help. This likely includes hours spent working, but don’t limit yourself to those.

When you take this more broad approach to defining community and defining service, you’ll find that you have plenty to do. You’ll find that being a part of a community and serving that community are inseparable. You’ll find that to be true from the family level up to the global level. It won’t be easy or simple, but you’ll have no problem explaining your service on college applications or to anyone else who asks. You’ll know why “day of service” events are really helpful, and you’ll also know why every day is a day of service.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, here are three easy things you can do:

1. Share it on your social media feeds so your friends and colleagues can see it too.

2. Read these related posts:

   Thinking about community service and college admissions

   Don’t submit that mission trip essay!

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3. Ask a question—or share other resources—in the comments section.

Apply with Sanity doesn’t have ads or annoying pop-ups. It doesn’t share user data, sell user data, or even track personal data. It doesn’t do anything to “monetize” you. You’re nothing but a reader to me, and that means everything to me.

Photo by Zoe Herring.

Apply with Sanity is a registered trademark of Apply with Sanity, LLC. All rights reserved.