Rich Kids Get the Summer Jobs

Here is an article in The Times Online about rich parents who are able to buy summer jobs for their kids to help them make their resumes nicer. For kids from poor families, it's another explanation for why rich people tend to have children who grow up rich.

From The Sunday Times
July 8, 2007

The price of your first break

Competition among teenagers and graduates for jobs is so fierce coaches are charging them up to £5,000 for help onto the ladder

Sian Griffiths

It’s the start of the long vacation and everyone is milling around figuring out how to get their child a summer job. In my London patch openings are jealously guarded: mothers feign innocence when it turns out they have stitched up their teen’s summer with a – well-paid – stint in a computing company topped off by “just a few weeks teaching drama at Camp America”.

With three graduates chasing every graduate-level job, it’s no longer enough to have a good degree. A glittering CV needs a string of enviable holiday placements too. As the career wars hot up, a rash of companies and consultants is offering to give rich, privileged teens and graduates the edge – albeit at a price. But is a bit of work experience worth paying £5,000 for?

Heather McGregor is a former investment banker turned headhunter whose 17-year-old son’s CV already boasts the kind of summer jobs that could propel him into the journalism position he covets.

Robert has done stints at CNN, The Guardian and the Financial Times. But his mother, who also writes the Mrs Moneypenny column in the Financial Times, says she so loathed the wheedling she had to do to land them – not to mention the requests she herself gets to provide holiday jobs – that she is launching a company to offer “a taste of the workplace” to children of the “rich and privileged”.

She won’t be begging work placements for her youngest two children, she says. Instead they’ll do work experience at GraduateJobsNetwork, her new business. “I had to beg all Robert’s work experience. And I didn’t enjoy it. I wouldn’t do it again,” she says. “The other two can come through my programme and I’ll write a cheque for five grand for each of them.”

More at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/.../article2041379.ece