Dead and Gone… The First Job

By Gary Payne, MBA Founder of FuneralCostOntario.ca The Fine Print My first job was at the International Squash Club in Mississauga. I started there in 1987 and did a little bit of everything. I sold memberships and services, dealt with towels, showed people how to use the circuit-training equipment and, every once in a while, got to fill in during house league when somebody didn’t show up. Some parts of the job were interesting. Some parts involved towels. At the time, I didn’t think of any of it as training. It was just my first job. I was learning more than I realized. I had to talk to adults I didn’t know and explain things to people who needed help. I learned that if you said you were going to be somewhere, people expected you to be there. Some jobs were enjoyable and some simply had to get done. Nobody called any of that training. Nobody needed to. We usually think of a teenager’s first job as a way to make a few dollars. It might pay for gas, clothes, a phone bill or simply provide a little independence. But those jobs did something else too. They were where a lot of us first learned how to work, and that is why one number from Statistics Canada caught my attention. Among returning students aged 15 and 16, the unemployment rate this summer was 29.9 per cent. Almost three in 10 of the youngest students looking for work didn’t find it. The interesting part is that this wasn’t true across the board. Among returning students aged 20 to 24, unemployment fell to 9.2 per cent. The summer job market actually improved for older students, while the youngest group barely changed. If you had a 15-year-old sitting at the kitchen table this summer filling out applications, checking an inbox and wondering why nobody was calling back, that distinction probably didn’t offer much comfort. There isn’t one neat explanation for what is happening. The economy matters, and employers get cautious when business slows. It would be a stretch to look at the youth unemployment number and declare that artificial intelligence caused it. But AI is changing the kind of work available at the bottom of the ladder, and that may turn out to matter just as much. In April 2025, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told employees that before asking for more headcount or resources, teams must demonstrate why they couldn’t get the work done using AI. He was talking about productivity, not teenagers. Still, think about the work that traditionally went to the new person: the first draft, the basic research, the spreadsheet cleanup, the simple customer follow-up and all the other jobs that more experienced people didn’t need to do themselves. It wasn’t glamorous work, but somebody more experienced could check it, correct it and send the new employee back to try again. The work got done, but something else was being produced at the same time: experience. AI is getting very good at exactly that kind of work. What makes Shopify interesting is that, even as it pushed employees to use AI more aggressively, it was also bringing more young people into the company. Its engineering leadership had already expanded its intern program and continued doing so after Lütke’s memo. The thinking was that younger workers brought something useful of their own: they were comfortable experimenting with new tools and approaching problems without years of habits behind them. In other words, one of the companies pushing hardest to use AI was also making a deliberate effort to keep bringing beginners through the door. The question isn’t whether a chatbot took a teenager’s summer job. It is what happens when more of the basic work people once learned on can be done without them. At the squash club, selling taught me how to deal with customers. Showing someone the circuit equipment taught me how to explain something clearly. Filling in during house league meant somebody trusted me enough to deal directly with members. Even the towels had a lesson in them. Not every part of a job is going to be interesting, and the uninteresting part still has to get done. The skilled trades have never lost sight of this. Nobody expects an apprentice to arrive with the judgment of someone who has been doing the job for 20 years. You watch, you try, somebody corrects you and you do it again. A lot of office and service jobs once worked that way too. We just didn’t call it an apprenticeship. Technology will change what the beginner does. It already has. The challenge is making sure we don’t confuse eliminating beginner tasks with eliminating the need to develop beginners. Somebody still has to learn how to deal with a customer, recover from a mistake, take instruction, earn trust and eventually become the person teaching the next one. When I started at the International Squash Club in 1987, I thought I was just working at a squash club. Looking back, I was learning how to work.