Why the Death of the Saturday Job is an Issue for the Marketing Sector

"I’m boycotting Costa."

That was the greeting I received at the dinner table last week. My daughter sat down, frustrated and defeated, after another afternoon spent chasing a part-time job that seemingly does not exist.

As a parent, your instinct is to offer a "back in my day" pep talk. For me, that meant reminiscing about my first Saturday job in a pet shop. I had to be there at 8:30 AM sharp every Saturday (regardless of what time I had made it to bed the night before!). While I loved the independence of taking home my pay at the end of the day, I absolutely hated cleaning out the rabbit cages. But that was the point: it taught me that work isn't always glamorous, but it is necessary.

The reality my daughter faces is fundamentally different. The "Saturday job" is becoming an endangered species—a shift highlighted in a recent article in The Times by Alan Milburn. He argues that this decline means young people simply aren't "ready for work" when they enter the professional world.

The Independence Gap

I see a teenager who is bright, capable, and eager to earn her own way, yet she is being shut out. We want our children to head off to university with the confidence that they can manage a budget and navigate a workplace. Instead, the message she is receiving is that her willingness to work isn't enough. How can we expect students to navigate the pressures of living away from home if they’ve never had the chance to manage their own earned income?

The View from Leadership

As a Director in the private sector who also runs my own consultancy, this gives me serious pause. In my world of marketing and communications, we talk a lot about "connecting with the audience." But you do not learn how to truly read a room or de-escalate a situation from a PowerPoint slide.

The Saturday job (even the parts involving rabbit cages) was a laboratory for interpersonal grit. It is where you learn to talk to all different kinds of people, from the chatty regular to the stressed parent in a rush. By losing these low-stakes environments for growth, we risk creating a generation entering a high-pressure corporate world with no prior experience of the "messiness" of human interaction.

A Global Perspective

Working internationally, I see how different cultures approach this transition into adulthood. Is this a uniquely British phenomenon, or are we seeing the "Death of the Saturday Job" across the globe? I am curious to hear from my network in other regions—is the path to early independence still open where you are?

A Call to Action for Leaders

As business leaders, we need to stop looking at this as a "teenager problem" and start seeing it as a talent pipeline problem.

My daughter might be boycotting Costa for now, but the bigger issue is that the door to independence is being bolted shut. So what do those of us already climbing the career ladder need to do to help her—and her peers—find the key?