Could Waiting Tables Be Better for Your Career Than an Internship?

The most important thing we do is school and internships, right? So many parents tell their kids to focus on school while mom and dad pay the bills. But, what about a restaurant job? Does that have value, or is it just a way to pay the rent?

HotSchedules CEO Anthony Lye thinks that a restaurant job may be the way to gain great skills that you can’t get anywhere else. He was kind enough to answer a few questions for me.

To read the interviews, click here: Which One Does a Better Job Preparing You for Success? An Internship or a Restaurant Job?

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5 thoughts on “Could Waiting Tables Be Better for Your Career Than an Internship?

  1. Internships prepare people for a particular job or industry, whereas restaurant work prepares one for “the real world.” In addition to the points made in the article, restaurant work can teach people that you have to crawl — that is, do so-called “scut work” — before you can soar. One also quickly learns that the quality of management can make or break a business, with bad managers considering their employees to be disposable and easily replaced, which damages morale and negatively impacts customer service. Finally, most entry-level restaurant workers earn low incomes, teaching them that they can survive even while struggling financially.

  2. I completely agree. In high school I worked as a hostess. I had to be the (first) face of the company, help the bus boys, wait staff, cooks, cleaners, and manage the money. Being a waitress and hostess put me through college and taught me the importance and value of every single person in the company as well as many other great business skills. Today I am a dedicated HR professional that has been blessed with working across the country as well as over seas. I have been lucky to have my best jobs find/recruit me because of many of the skills learned in the restaurant business.

  3. I never worked an unpaid internship. My parents made too much money to qualify me for aid programs but too little to actually help me pay for college. I HAD to work 40-60 hours a week to pay my rent and tuition. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. The customer service skills, interacting with co-workers of all ages and educational levels, learning to diffuse tense situations, and live on a budget – than take the BUS home, study until bedtime, then get up and head to class at the crack of dawn. That’s REAL life.

  4. I think it depends on the type of industry. My friends in college did Big 5 Accounting firm internships, and those were more like real jobs, from how they described them back then. However, my experience in other industries and with internships now echoes what this article is saying. I think it is hard to come up with meaningful and impactful work for an intern that isn’t already getting done by a staff member.

    I think the changes that have happened in offices don’t help either. More people communicate via email, so you don’t need someone handling the phones. Most offices are virtually paperless now, so there is no filing or pulling or purging files, or mail to sort, or copying to do. Most basic data work has been automated, so data entry isn’t needed, or at least it’s not a separate area. All tasks that interns used to do that isn’t really needed anymore.

    So now you have to start people off on more complicated tasks from the get go, which is challenging for the intern as well as the person in charge of the intern.

  5. Hi
    I believe Internship in this competitive world is an easy way to enter into big organizations and specially it helps upgrading your resume or profile by tagging with big brands.

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