In Britain many school students combine full-time education with part-time employment (Howieson et al., 2006). In recent years there has been a significant shift in the debates surrounding this type of employment experience. In the previous decade concern was expressed about the negative consequences of such employment on education. In contrast contemporary debates have started to discuss the potential value of this experience. However, the debate suffers from a lack of detailed information on the ‘quality’ of such employment experience. Some exploratory studies have been carried out (McKechnie et al., 2002; McKechnie et al., 2004). These studies have argued that this type of employment experience can provide opportunities for skill attainment and develop knowledge about the ‘world of work’. In this paper we develop this argument by considering the evidence from a large scale study of school students’ employment.

Data was collected from a large representative sample of school students in Scotland (n= 18,430). The students were in age range from 14 to 17 years of age. Students were surveyed about their part-time employment. In this paper we focus on the responses to a series of questions regarding the demands and quality of their jobs. Multivariate analysis was carried out to allow us to explore the impact of a range of variables including age, gender, job type, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and location.

Results indicate that we would be wrong to dismiss such work as “children’s jobs”. The findings demonstrate that range of skills that this group of young workers is exposed to within the workplace. We explore the variations between jobs in terms of how demanding they are and identify what factors influence whether an individual student is more or less likely to have a ‘demanding job’.