It could only be a matter of time before parents start paying big department stores or small businesses for the privilege of teaching their children how to work.
If that sounds far-fetched, your children haven’t been walking the pavement, uploading resumes, and trying to break in to the casual after-school jobs market that was a job starter for so many of us, in our 40s and beyond.
It used to be a rite-of-passage. The McDonalds drive-through. On the checkout at Woolies. In the deli section at Coles. Sweeping the footpath in front of the local newsagent.
Each Thursday evening after school, and again on Saturday morning, most of us would trot off for an extra-curricular lesson in becoming a paid worker. Over school holidays, particularly at Christmas, our bank balances would bulge, along with the dreams we held of how we’d spend our hard-earned cash.
Along the way, we learnt the nitty-gritty of being a good worker: turning up on time, dressed neatly, and talking to each customer so that they would want to return to the store, again and again.
Often the lessons went further than that; in my case, a father, whose son had pilfered a torch, brought him back to the store and asked whether I would talk to his nine-year-old. At 16, that gave my confidence an almighty boost.
All terrific experience, that you - so far - can’t pay for these days.
Nor can you easily get the training a job interview offers, as I’ve found out over the past eight weeks by joining my 15-year-old niece in the hunt for a suitable after-school and weekend job.
Handing a resume over the counter? Forget it. Stores don’t want paper. Indeed, they rarely want to see a prospective job seeker. Instead, they’ll request you simply upload a resume onto their site, or a broader job-seeking site.
Is there no value in eye-balling an applicant? Seeing, first hand, whether their hair is pulled back? Or whether they are wearing shoes?
Apparently not. But even lodging your interest for a job takes the unusual to the bizarre. Take this example. The prerequisite for applying for a role that requires you to collect trolleys from a big shopping centre is a 25-minute, 13-page test. Done online, presumably with the assistance of your parents, it asks the applicant to give the most effective and least effective responses to various video scenarios.
None of them indicate how well you’d navigate a trolley. Nor do they address a growing employers' view that the skill they need most in new employees is communication. Algorithms can do simple tasks, but as yet, they don’t boast emotional intelligence.
The casual job market, for those still at school, is quickly disappearing - and with it, that invaluable stock of knowledge it has taught previous generations.
The consequence of that is still to be felt - because a major predictor now, of whether you will enter the workforce, is whether you are already employed at some level.
Three tertiary degrees might look and feel good. So might topping your final year exams. But workplace research suggests that those with on-the-job experience are top-of-mind when bigger jobs are handed out.
The need for someone to take your order at Kentucky Fried Chicken, or to serve you at Subway, hasn’t changed. But the demographic of those doing that work has changed significantly.
Remember former treasurer Joe Hockey’s meet-and-greet at Bunnings, where two employees, in their mid-80s, were still turning up to work, five days a week?
More than half the jobs created in the world since 1990 have been part time and end-of-working-life casuals, who have left the full-time workforce, are filling the slots, once the domain of 15 to 18-year-olds.
In the big retail stores, women with their children off their hands are going back to work for a few hours each afternoon; taking those same spots they might have had 40 years ago.
For student job seekers, the outlook is unlikely to improve. More than 40 per cent of workers plan to switch from full time to part time work before retiring, and jobs will get tighter at the unskilled end of the market. Many studies already point to between 40 and 50 per cent of jobs disappearing - because of new technology.
Put all this together: unskilled jobs drying up, more jobs becoming casual, jobs becoming harder to get at entry level, and it becoming more difficult to develop the emotional intelligence needed in any workforce.
It begs the question: what the hell are we doing? Teenagers are really good at the technology which is chewing up their prospects and the prospects of future employers getting good recruits.
And that means it might not be too long before you ask your local newsagent whether there’s a casual student job on offer, and he or she wants to charge you for the privilege of schooling your child in the job market.
After all, if the best way to get into the workforce is to have experience in the workforce, would this be any different to paying for your child’s academic education?
And that scenario could see children competing with parents for the privilege of the same casual after-school job.
Or at least it might mean parents putting their hands in their pocket so that their children can be in the box seat, when a job does come along.
Madonna King is a senior journalist, and has worked at News Corporation Australia, Fairfax and the ABC. She is the author of six books.
