Most university students think of part-time jobs mostly as a way to make money. That certainly is the main thing, as well as the most obvious one, that they do. But part-time jobs have benefits beyond making money. Here are a few that you probably haven’t thought much about.
Keeping You From Spending Money
If you spend 20 hours per week working in your part-time job, that will be 20 hours that you will not be out spending money in the pursuit of entertainment and diversion. In addition, working will also soak up a good amount of your extra energy. That by itself will eliminate a lot of the motivation you might have to spend money looking for fun.
Related: Part-time Jobs Where You Can Study
Imposing Order On Your Life
If you are carrying a light schedule at school, you may actually be able to use a part-time job to help create the order that you desperately need to succeed in school.
There is a saying, if you have a difficult task, give it to a busy man – he will find a better way. While you don’t want to overload yourself with school and work responsibilities, you should want to keep yourself busy enough that you achieve maximum efficiency and productivity during your university career. A part-time job can help you find and maintain that balance.
Related: Friends, Family, Freedom, and Free Beer: A Balancing Act
Learning “How To Work”
While university can be an excellent way to learn a specific career, one thing that it will not do is teach you how to function in a work environment. You can only learn that by being out working in the real world and learning on the front lines.
Employers are aware of this as well. Just because you have a degree doesn’t mean that you appreciate soft, subtle employment skills, such as punctuality, respect for authority, or maintaining integrity in a place where money is changing hands. A part-time job will help you to learn that.
Related: Career Skills You Need to Learn Before Graduation
Learning New Skills
While you can learn certain skills at university, you won’t actually master them until you’re out in the work force putting them into action on a regular basis. There is also a world of difference between theory and application when it comes to skills. Theory is often dominated by the preferred or right way to do things. Application is usually a matter of finding what works. Being able to merge the two is a true art form.
In addition, by holding a part-time job, you could learn skills that you won’t learn in a classroom setting. This can include sales skills, troubleshooting problems, and learning to make the most of an environment with limited resources. That’s the real world, the one that you’ll be experiencing for the rest of your working career once you get out of university. A part-time job can help you learn much of that now.
Learning How To Deal With People
Of all of the skills you will learn in your life, perhaps most important is how to deal with people. That’s exactly what you have to do once you get into your career on a full-time basis. You’ll have to learn to deal with supervisors, coworkers, and even customers.
There is a world of difference in dealing with these people types, compared to university professors and your friends at school. This is particularly true if, like most people, you will be working in the for-profit sector after graduation. When money is on the line, people are quite different than they are in a purely academic setting. You can get some early experience dealing with that through a part-time job right now.
Meeting New People
There is a social component involved with work that is generally underestimated, particularly by students. Once you graduate, your career will be one of your primary ways of meeting new friends. You might even meet your future spouse in a job situation.
The point is, a part-time job can be a way of meeting new friends, and even future business contacts. A job situation is a very different environment from a university campus, and you will learn to meet people on a job that will be substantially different from the people you meet in school.
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There is a commonality that people share when they are working with the same employer, and particularly in similar jobs. That could lead to friendships that are deeper and longer lasting than what you have at school.
Have you done much thinking about having a part-time job, and what it can do for you apart from simply earning you money?
