Can you remember your first job?

Was it flipping burgers?

Did you work for your parents?

Did you leave school early and head straight into your ‘forever’ job, knowing that your education was going to come courtesy of life experience?

Mine was a paper route and I hated it.

To put it in perspective, I was so desperate for my own cash, I accepted the only job I could get, and that happened to involve delivering the local rag in suburbs about 15 minutes from home.

It was only when I arrived and pulled my deadly-treadly out of the back of dad’s car, that I worked out why this was the only paper route on offer.

Mt Lofty looked like a molehill in comparison to what I faced that day. With my primary school legs burning with lactic acid, straining against the no geared pedals of my Malvern Star, I very quickly worked out that work was, well, hard work.

But then that first paycheck came in and, boy oh boy, was it worth it.

I could now spend it on whatever I wanted as I had earned it. I was blithely unaware of the amount of extra work my cross-suburb commute was creating for my father as he dropped and picked up, picked up and dropped me in random streets. And that didn’t count all of his help folding the papers into throwable thirds.

Nope, in my head I had earnt that fair and square, and it gave me the freedom to wander the aisles of Brashs music store, tossing up between Taylor Dane, Bon Jovi and Poison (again bringing more inconvenience to my classical music-loving father).

I was reminded of this independence over the weekend when my daughter took off for her first job.

She was working with a family friend who’s a clown (I swear I’m not making that up) and had to help entertain kids and locals while applying glitter tattoos at a Murray Bridge hardware store.

Frankly, I couldn’t have been prouder.

Sure, the pep in her step waned slightly between the first and second day as the reality of hard work hit home, but once she had steeled herself for another day, I told her to think about how she would spend her earnings.

Now she’s tossing up between a fake nose ring, a book she’s dying to read or buying a cow with her farmer Grandfather to make the most of a potential bump in beef prices if this foot and mouth stuff starts escalating.

It’s not pop music, nor an INXS wall poster, but I have to hand it to her, she’s probably on track to be much wiser with her money than I was at that age.

Now she’s like the bull at the gate she wants to buy and has spent the last few days researching the various minimum working ages at some of the bigger companies that might hire her.

The huge takeaway conglomerates like Maccas and Hungry Jacks align at 14 years and nine months before you can be hired and, despite there being no official minimum working age in South Australia, it looks like most employers take a similar stance.

My daughter is still a few years away from being able to skill up and head into the workforce proper, but I can’t help but wonder what that will look like for her.

Right now, we know there are massive skill shortages across the board.

Peak bodies have said we’re over 150,000 workers short across our food supply chain alone, with flow-on effects including price rises, product availability risk, and farmers not fully planting out crops as they have no one to help harvest them.

Speak to anyone in hospitality now and they are crying out for staff so they can book out restaurants and give the standard of service they need to ensure return patronage.

We’re missing around 8000 people in the mining sector, we don’t have enough in childcare, aged or the disability sectors and even IT hasn’t emerged unscathed.

In pretty much every field except politics and AFL footy coaching, there are not enough people for the positions.

So, what is the solution, or solutions?

Where do you start?

Some sectors need visa relaxations, others want more training opportunities as of yesterday, and others are turning to cash incentives such as those given to regional teachers not long ago.

Tonight, I will drive a discussion around the barrier to skills training for some of our most vulnerable as part of a Committee for Adelaide panel. Next week a national Jobs and Skills summit will bring together business heads, union and government representatives and industry stakeholders to see how best to plug these holes.

So, while the current issues are being dealt with, it brings me back to wondering what the work options will be for kids like my daughter who are still a few years off from starting their working life in earnest.

We’ll be more than five years on from the pandemic by then. Will we have adjusted to the worldwide disruption or will we then be faced with too many people skilled in the wrong areas as the cyclical flow of supply and demand continues?

Whatever happens, it seems unlikely I will need to follow in my father’s footsteps and drop my girl to a paper route 16 suburbs over because, of course, there are barely any suburban papers left to deliver.

Ali Clarke presents the breakfast show on Mix 102.3. She is a regular columnist for InDaily.