Aissatou Royce-Diop started working behind the counter at the Dairy Queen on E. 38th Street in Minneapolis this week.
The freckled 14-year-old concentrated on flipping the curl at the top of a soft serve ice cream cone, which, according to her boss, Dairy Queen insists upon. "It's not as easy as it looks," she said Friday. "I almost have it."
Job prospects for Minnesota teenagers like Royce-Diop are getting better, new data show.
Estimated unemployment for teenagers over 15 has fallen by half since 2011 and is now at its lowest level since 2003. Most teens will get a pay bump from a higher state minimum wage in August. Shops, restaurants and amusement parks are starting to hire summer workers now, and they say competition for employees is growing.
"With the tightening labor market, teens are going to be a hotter commodity than they've been in a while," said Oriane Casale, a state labor market economist.
The share of teens looking for a job who couldn't find one skyrocketed in the 2008-09 recession, rising as high as 21 percent and then falling slowly. The speed of that drop picked up over the last 24 months, and the state's teen jobless rate was estimated at 10.8 percent in March.
Only Montana, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska have lower teen jobless rates than Minnesota.
Valleyfair hires 1,600 workers each summer, about 1,000 of them teens. They take tickets, cook and serve food, operate rides, sell trinkets and run game booths. Jobs start at $9 an hour, and most workers get a 50-cent-an-hour bonus at the end of the season if they keep up their end of the bargain and work the whole way through.
Still, it's getting more difficult to find workers, said Matt McCormack, director of marketing at Valleyfair. "With the competitive market, yes, it is difficult to hire for all of these positions," he said.
The hardest job to fill is ride operators, who by state law must be 18. Another challenge is transportation, since it's difficult for teens without a car to get to the amusement park, located in the southwestern suburb of Shakopee.
Kylie Stumph, a ride supervisor in the park's Planet Snoopy section, first worked at Valleyfair as an 18-year-old in 2011 and worked her way up to oversee other ride operators. "It's not that hard to find a job," said Stumph, now 22, of Shakopee. "It's more of you actually have to want it and try to get the job."
Minnesota has the seventh-highest labor-force participation rate in the country for teens, at 48.5 percent. Nationally, the rate is about 33 percent.
Of the 282,300 teenagers ages 16 to 19 in the state, about 43 percent — 120,000 — were working in March. Another 14,600 are looking for a job but don't have one — the officially unemployed. The other 147,000 either aren't trying to work or they work in jobs the state does not track, such as baby-sitting or informal lawn mowing.
More than half of the teens with jobs work in food service, hospitality and retail.
Teen unemployment is tough to pin down since the distinction between those looking and those not looking for work can be hazy. If young people don't sense that they will be able to find a job, they might not try, said Casale.
"They're probably much more sensitive to peer experience," she said. "If all of their friends are finding work, even if they haven't thought about looking for a job, suddenly, oh, maybe I can find a job too."
Steve Gillen has owned the Dairy Queen across from Bancroft Elementary in south Minneapolis for 21 years, and he and his wife, Kristal, hire 10 to 15 part-time workers a year, most of them teenagers. He raised wages this year from $6.50 per hour to $7.25 per hour in anticipation of August's increase in the state's minimum wage.
Just after the rush of parents and kids from Bancroft came through on Friday afternoon, Gillen and Royce-Diop had time to chat. She wants to be a detective or a singer when she gets older. The job at Dairy Queen is her first, and she plans to save most of what she makes this summer for college. "I'm going to be smart about it, because this is my opportunity to have a better life in the future," she said.
She found out about the job from her cousin and brother.
"A lot of times that's how it goes — friends of friends, or relatives," Gillen said.
He looks for good grades and extracurricular activities on a résumé, and a warm personality. He's had enough success over the years that he gets tired of people criticizing "kids these days."
"I've got a lot of good kids," he said. "A lot who work hard."
Adam Belz • 612-673-4405 Twitter: @adambelz
