Back to School: Transitioning from Summer Jobs | Judd Kessler

The Challenges in Landing a Summer Job

Dan Loney: Many teenagers are coming off of a summer where they may have had a job, but some teens face challenges in the labor market. There is also the question of what skills do young adults need to be successful right now. Those areas have been studied by our next guest, Judd Kessler, who is a professor of business economics and public policy.

Judd, let’s start out with the first component of this: the challenge for teenagers to be able to find work. This is a historical pattern that’s gone on for some time.

Judd Kessler: There are historically high rates of unemployment for youth, particularly in the summer when they’re not in school, so it’s a perennial problem. Kids who don’t necessarily have anything to do in the summer want to find a job. It’s hard in a lot of labor markets to find employers who are willing to take a chance on youth who’ve never had a job before. They’re worried potentially about getting somebody who isn’t quite up for the task. So, youth have trouble in the summer finding work.

Loney: You talk about something called “information frictions” that end up playing out.

Kessler: There are youth who certainly have the skills to work at a park or a daycare center at a day camp. Those are the kinds of jobs in the summer that are in high demand, and youth could fill them. But employers might not know that a specific youth has the skills necessary, is responsible enough, is a dedicated enough worker, communicates well enough to fill that role successfully.

The issue what we as economists call information frictions — there’s some information gap between what the employer can infer about somebody from, say, their resume, and what they’re actually capable of doing. There’s always a missed opportunity when an employer has a position that could be filled by a talented young person, but they’re just not willing to take a chance on them because of some gap in information.

Loney: From some of the historical data, this happens more frequently with African American or Latino youth.

Kessler: These are the groups that we focus on primarily in the study that we do. We partner with the New York City Summer Youth Employment Program, which is the largest summer youth employment program in the country. Because it’s attracting youth 14 to 24 years old in New York City who are looking for a job through this program rather than finding one on their own, it’s disproportionately Black and Hispanic youth. So, about 75% of the youth that we study in our work are Black or Hispanic.

Loney: Tell us about how the research came about.

Kessler: This is a great research partnership. I’ve really enjoyed working with the city agency. The first project we ever did with them was just looking at historic data from the city employment program. They have, as long as anyone can remember, randomized access to the jobs program because there are so many kids who want these jobs. They don’t have as many jobs as they as there are kids who want to fill them, so they use a lottery to determine who gets the job.

Our very earliest work looked at historic data, 2005 to 2008, those summers. We looked at youth who wanted a job, some of whom randomly were selected to get them, and then we followed them for years after. What we found was pretty amazing. The topline result is that the youth who were given a job through the program were more likely to be alive seven, eight, nine years after the program. That was associated with a reduction in criminal justice contact. They were less likely to be arrested or convicted or end up in state prison. There were lots of great benefits for being in the program.

But one thing that we noticed in that data was that there was not a labor market improvement after the summer that they participated in the program. Sure, if I give you a job in the summer, you’re more likely to have a job than folks who don’t get offered one. But we, as researchers, thought we would see that in the years that followed, the kids who had been given a job would be more likely to be in the labor market or be earning more. We just didn’t see that.

That led us to wonder, is there some information friction that is preventing kids who have had a summer job through this program from turning their experience into a job in the next summer or even during the school year? That was what prompted the study I think we’re going to talk more about now.

Loney: Because you would think that the experience of having that job would naturally flow into the next year or the year after that, right?

Kessler: Yeah, and to a certain extent it did. One thing that we noticed that was a surprise to us in that early research was that the kids who were given a summer job, they were just as likely, maybe even a little bit more likely, to have a job the next summer. But on average, they earned less than the kids who had not gotten a job. So, it looked like the program was actually reducing their earnings.

When we dug into that, it turned out that the youth who had been given a job through the program were returning to the types of jobs that they had in the program. They were returning to day camps, to daycare centers, to jobs that you really can only do in the summer and that don’t pay that much. We wondered if maybe it could be that they learned that they liked that job and they wanted to do it again. That would be a totally understandable phenomenon.

But we also wondered, well, maybe these kids have been a camp counselor and what they would really like to do now is work in an office or a retail setting at a restaurant. But they don’t have a way of turning their experience being a good employee at the day camp into the kind of job that they want. We wondered if it was the case that the program was giving them the experiences that they needed, but that we needed to do something to help them communicate to future employers that they had the skills to succeed.

Why Teenagers Should Develop Soft Skills for Better Job Prospects

Loney: Part of this goes to the other piece of research we’re going to be talking about, which is this area of soft skills.

Kessler: Exactly. This was the study that we did that we’re just publishing now. But it was a study that we did with the Summer Youth Employment Program in New York. This is joint with Sarah Heller, who used to be here at Penn but now is at Michigan.

We partnered with the Summer Youth Employment Program to build a letter of recommendation engine for the supervisors in their program. We piloted this in 2016, and we did it for the full group in 2017. The supervisors who had overseen the youth workers were invited to take a survey about them, and we randomly selected some of the youth to be eligible for a letter of recommendation.

The supervisors would see the list of their youth employees and would click on the ones that they thought were good enough that they deserved a letter of recommendation. And then we asked them a bunch of questions. How was this youth as a worker overall? They would pick an adjective to describe from very poor, poor, good, very good, excellent, exceptional. The idea was they would take the survey and every answer, if it was positive enough, would lead to a sentence in a letter of recommendation. If they were writing about me and said I was an exceptional worker, a sentence would appear. “Judd Kessler was an exceptional employee.”

If the responses were positive enough, we would generate a letter of recommendation from the supervisor on letterhead associated with the city Department of Youth and Community Development, and we would send that to the youth. Five hard copies, one soft copy, that then they could use in future job applications.

The idea was, you have these skills. You’ve shown a supervisor in this program how good you are. Now we want to give you a way of showing other people who might be interested in hiring you just how good you were. The letter itself really captured soft skills. It talked about communication, showing up on time, taking initiative, things like that. It was a way that youth could validate that they had those skills.

Loney: Do you think there’s enough understanding by the kids of how valuable having this letter and having these skills can be when you’re talking about the next job or the job after that?

Kessler: We were interested in that in particular. We knew we were going to compare the group that was eligible to get a letter to the group that had randomly been excluded from getting a letter. Of course, the kids who get the letters are going to be higher performers than the kids who don’t get letters, if it’s all about the supervisor choosing to write or not.

We used random assignment to generate the two groups. But we knew we were going to compare those groups, and we were going to look at earnings data from New York state records. But if we saw an effect, which we ended up seeing, we weren’t going to know whether that was because it was the kids who got the letters got more confident and started applying to more jobs and kind of recognized that they would be better off in the labor market, or if it was as our hypothesis was, that the employer needed to see this letter, needed the soft skills validated to to make a job offer.

The way that we got at this was we actually created a job for the youth to give them an opportunity to apply. It was a job working for me at Penn. We invited a small subset of the group that was eligible for the letters and the group that wasn’t to apply. What we were interested in was whether application rates would differ. But also, most fundamentally, whether they would actually use the letter in the application.

We did not see a difference in application rates. The kids who got the letter did not become more likely to apply. We even asked a question to get at confidence. We asked them if they wanted to be considered for a higher paying, harder job. We did not see that kids who got the letter were more likely to opt into that, so it wasn’t affecting their confidence or their motivation to apply.

But we asked them — and we did this in a light touch way — if they would like to attach any additional materials. We didn’t mention a letter of recommendation. We just said, “If you’d like to attach anything additional, please do so here.” The kids that were sent the letter were substantially more likely to submit it. They were four times more likely, approximately, to attach a letter of recommendation to the application. That made us confident that, yes, the kids who get the letter recognized its value, which gave us confidence that when we saw earnings effects, it was actually because they were using the letter.

Loney: Were you able to gauge the impact of not having the soft skills and what that meant for those kids?

Kessler: It’s a little tough on that. We hired everybody who applied. But in the actual labor market, if you are sent a letter, then you are more likely to have a job in the year that follows getting the letter. So, a 3-percentage point increase in employment. You find a job faster, you earn more. We saw the youth who got our letters were earning a few hundred dollars more each year, and by the end of the four years that we looked at, it was about $1,300 more that they had earned, which was about a 5% increase in earnings.

Getting the letters was very helpful for these youth, it turns out. For the kids who are not eligible for the letter, we just asked supervisors the first question of how good are they as an employee overall, which let us look at youth who were not that great. Poor, very poor, good kind of range. And then also look at the strong youth — excellent, exceptional, very good. The letters really help if you are very good, excellent or exceptional. Almost all of the effect that we see of the letters is coming from the kids who are getting very, very positive letters.

You need both. You need the soft skills, and then you need a way of showing employers that you have the soft skills. And once you have both of those, then the youth can additionally succeed on the labor market.

Loney: There is also a component of the research that looked at girls versus boys in terms of getting that letter and having that affirmation.

Kessler: One thing that is true of youth in this age range is that the young women kind of outperform the young men in terms of earning more on the labor market. Looking at the ratings that supervisors gave, we saw that young women were getting higher ratings on that overall score, and that correlated with the higher earnings in the labor market in the year that preceded being in the program. So, to summarize, the women are doing better on the labor market. And it looks like a big component of that is they have these soft skills, maybe earlier or to a higher degree than young men have.

Loney: Maybe we need to have more discussion about the value of soft skills?

Kessler: One thing about our research that leaves that question a little bit open is that we surprised the youth, to a certain extent, with these letters of recommendation. They didn’t know at the start of the summer that, “Hey, we’re going to have your supervisor potentially answer questions about you.” Now, if we had done that, maybe the youth here would have shown up on time more often, or worked harder in the job so that they could get a better letter. But it could be there are improvements that could be made even without further education, just kind of reminding kids that anyone they work for could potentially be a recommender, whether it’s a physical letter or just making a call. This is an important skill that you need from going from one job to the next.

But we didn’t do any of the soft skill development. They came to the job with the soft skills that they had. That being said, the summer program and programs like it across the country, I think, do try to instill in the youth that participate these soft skills. Our research isn’t doing it, but the programs are. They’re encouraging them. You have to show up to work on time if you have a problem. You have to communicate with your supervisor.

The philosophy behind these programs is, even if you’re working at a day camp and the job you want is in an office, you’re learning the soft skills at the day camp that we think will translate to the office. Having initiative, showing up on time, being a good communicator. These important skills, you can develop them and learn them and practice them no matter what job you’re in.