VIDEO: Young Job Seekers are Trying to Land Summer Jobs

COLUMBUS, Miss. (WCBI) – The loss of the Mississippi Department of Transportation job program, leaves a lot of students in our area searching for summer work.

It didn’t require job experience and gave students something to do over the summer, and not having those extra jobs, is making it even harder to find one for high school and college students in the area.

The MDOT Summer Youth Program was a win win for the community and the young job seekers.

“Not only were they learning skills, but they were learning how to show up, how to be on time, how to be responsible, and how to follow instructions and we were big on that. We were trying to prepare them for the real world,” says program project coordinator, Travis L. Jones.

Now, many are learning a new lesson about the real world and that’s how tough it is to find a place to work.

“It’s going to cause them to do some old fashion searching now. They’re going to have to get up early and go put in applications at different locations and it’s very competitive out there this summer,” says Jones.

It’s something college student Tiffany Guyton has been going through since summer break kicked off.

“Something that’s making minimum wage and it’s really hard to find jobs like that because there’s so many people. You’ve got high school students and you’ve got college students. You’ve got people who are not in school trying to find a job and you’re just competing with all of these people just to find a job for the summer.”

Not only is it competitive, but many places don’t hire people without experience like the MDOT Summer Youth Program did.

“I’ve put in numerous applications. I went job hunting numerous times and they want you to have a certain amount of experience, but being twenty, I don’t have that much experience,” says Guyton.

 

 

Categories: Local News

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