How Working Two or More Jobs Now Will Help Your Future

By Kaitlin Hurtado on September 20, 2017

If you haven’t thought about securing more than one part-time job in college for financial reasons, you may want to consider doing so to better your own future. One part-time job may seem like more than enough when you think it impacts all other aspects of your life, but when you add another job (or more), you are gaining plenty of benefits that will help you further down the road.

Improve your financial situation 

This benefit may seem obvious as it is one of the leading reasons why someone would even start looking for more than one job in the first place. In college, many students find themselves struggling to get by between paychecks. Meals can be skipped to save for gas, or you’ll skip out on hanging out with friends just to save and eat whatever you can scrounge up on your own at home.

Having two or more jobs will let you spend one paycheck on bare necessities like rent, gas, and groceries, and your second paycheck elsewhere. You can save up for the future (a bigger apartment, a car, a trip), start paying off your student loans, or just treat yourself with a little splurge when you feel like you really deserve it.

Having that extra paycheck will prevent you from graduating college with little to none in savings, especially when you will not be receiving that leftover financial aid to help you get by as you did during your college years.

Get even more experience and network with more people

While it’s hard to find the “perfect” part-time job for you, there will be aspects of different jobs that will attract you to them. A restaurant job can get you fast cash on weekends while you bus tables for a dinner shift, but working the front desk in a dentist office might give you more “professional” experience that will help your future career more. Instead of picking between the two, get both and enjoy the benefits that come with both of them.

Pull the best aspects out of each job to help build a skill set that will secure a job in the future. You can say that you worked around healthcare professionals, but also have plenty of customer service in different fields.

Working multiple jobs will also help you expand your network as you are bound to meet and work with more people than you would with just one job. You will be able to pick and choose who to get recommendations from for later applications when you have worked extensively with them and stay in touch with them even after you don’t work with them any longer.

Keep yourself busy and maximize your time 

You may be surprised at how much free time you find yourself having in college. Try logging your typical day and you can see how much time goes into meaningless things — excessive sleeping, playing video games, or watching shows when you could be making better use of your time. Of course, when you’re in school full-time and already have a part-time job, you might not have a lot of free time to secure another job, but if it’s summer and you are not taking any classes, try taking on another job.

Spending summers working multiple jobs when you already know you won’t be taking summer classes or traveling much will allow you to save up for the upcoming school year when you may not be able to hold multiple jobs, or even just one.

Improve your time-management skills

While having one part-time job helps you build your time-management skills, having multiple jobs will allow you to rapidly improve your time-management skills as your list of responsibilities grows longer. You’ll need to be at different places at different times, and if you don’t put effort into keeping your schedule on track, you may fall behind in one or more aspects of your life.

Spend time forming a schedule that works for you. Prioritize your studies, and make sure you’re not going to have to skip on class to make it to a shift later on. Remember to always update your availability when a change in your schedule comes out, and plan accordingly to give you both travel and rest time.

There is no use in having multiple jobs for any specific benefit if it lands you in hot water with your professors or management when you aren’t performing tasks up to expectation or constantly showing up late/leaving early because of another responsibility.

It will be hard to get into a routine at first, but once you do get into a groove, managing your time will be much easier in college and later on when you are juggling different tasks in the workplace and in your own personal life.

Image via pexels.com

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