Roll Into a Summer Job

By Chris Frederick · April 2026

Spring is here. You can feel it. The windows are open, the days are stretching out, and there’s this energy in the air that just says: something new is coming.

For our kids, that something might be one of the biggest moments of their young lives. A first job. A first internship. That first summer where they’re not just hanging out, but actually doing something. Getting up, going somewhere, earning their own money, and coming home tired in a way that feels different from anything they’ve felt before.

I’m a parent. I think about this stuff constantly. I want my kids to have the kind of summer that changes them a little. I want them to learn what it feels like to be accountable to someone who isn’t me. I want them to understand that money is earned, that budgets are real, and that showing up on time matters. Not because I told them, but because they lived it. I want them to experience the pride that comes from doing hard work and doing it well.

And honestly? I want them to try something they’ve never tried before. Something outside their comfort zone. Working a concession stand, maintaining a golf course, counseling younger kids at a summer camp. These aren’t just jobs. They’re the kinds of experiences that shape who you become.

But here’s the part that keeps me up at night as a parent: how do you actually find these opportunities?

It Shouldn’t Be This Hard

If you’re a busy parent trying to help your kid find summer work, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You don’t have hours to spend scouring the internet. You sit down after dinner, open up Indeed or LinkedIn, and immediately feel overwhelmed. The results are either way too advanced for your teenager or completely irrelevant. Warehouse associate. CDL driver. Insurance sales. Your kid is 16.

And if your college student is coming home for the summer and needs an internship? Most of those were posted back in January. The big-name programs are full. The ones that are left require relocation to a city you can’t afford to send them to.

Meanwhile, the jobs that would actually be perfect are the ones you can’t find. The seasonal gig at your local parks department. The YMCA down the street. The manufacturing company your neighbor works at. The summer camp two towns over. You don’t even know these openings exist. They’re posted on some hiring portal you’ve never heard of. Or they’re buried in a PDF on a city government website. Or they’re on a career page that no search engine bothers to index.

If you happen to know someone (a friend who works there, a neighbor on the school board, a connection through church) you hear about these things. But if you don’t have that network? You’re stuck.

That’s the problem I wanted to solve. And it’s a big part of why we built Rollie.

Your Chamber of Commerce Already Knows Who’s Hiring

Here’s something most parents don’t think about: your local chamber of commerce has relationships with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of employers in your area. They know who’s growing, who’s hiring, and who needs help filling seasonal positions. They’re already connected to the exact employers who have summer jobs for your kids.

The missing piece has always been visibility. Those employers post their jobs on their own career pages, on ATS platforms, on municipal websites, and nobody aggregates them. Nobody makes them easy to search. Nobody connects the dots between “local employer needs summer help” and “local family needs summer opportunity.”

That’s what Rollie does. Our AI agents visit the career pages of chamber member companies every week. They find the jobs, no matter where they’re posted, and bring them together in one searchable place. When your chamber partners with Rollie, suddenly all of those hidden opportunities become findable. Your chamber becomes the place where families go to find great summer work for their kids.

Let me show you what that looks like in practice.

Real Jobs, Right Now: What Rollie Found

We ran a bunch of searches through Rollie’s job intelligence hub. Not limited to any single city, just looking across the thousands of employers we track. We weren’t on Indeed. We weren’t on LinkedIn. We were looking at actual company career pages, municipal hiring portals, nonprofit job boards, and ATS systems that most job seekers never think to check.

Here’s what came back. Every one of these is a real, active job posting.

Jobs for Teens: Where Responsibility Gets Real

These are the jobs that teach your kid what it means to show up, work hard, and figure things out. They don’t require a degree. They don’t require experience. They require a willingness to try.

Seitz Park Concession Cashier at the City of South Bend, Indiana. Part-time, seasonal. Your kid works a concession stand at a public park. They learn to handle money, serve customers, and keep things running on a hot summer day. This job is posted on a Paychex hiring portal linked from a municipal website, the kind of place no teenager is browsing on their own.

S.A.L.T. Teen Program at Southeastern Baptist Youth Camp, Greensburg, Indiana. Ages 14 and up. This is a structured service and leadership training program that runs June 1 through July 23. Participants earn $50 per week with food and housing included. It requires a food handler certification and a real commitment to showing up every day. The kind of summer experience that stays with you forever. And it’s listed on an UltraCamp registration page, literally impossible to find through a traditional job search.

Lifeguard at Decatur County Family YMCA, Greensburg, Indiana. Part-time, $11–$12/hour. The quintessential summer job. Your kid gets certified, learns responsibility for other people’s safety, and gains confidence that carries into everything else they do. Finding YMCA lifeguard openings means checking each branch’s individual career page, which is exactly what Rollie does automatically.

Camp Counselor at Decatur County Parks & Recreation, Indiana. Part-time, ages 16+. Working with kids, including children with special needs. CPR and First Aid training included. Posted on the county government’s employment page, another gold mine that major job boards completely ignore.

Cart Attendant at Meijer, Rockford, Michigan. Part-time, afternoons and weekends. Classic retail work. Gathering carts, keeping the lot clean, helping customers. It teaches hustle and it teaches humility. Posted on Meijer’s Workday ATS.

Sweets Staff at New Horizons Rehabilitation, Batesville, Indiana. Part-time, seasonal, up to $12/hour. Working the sweet shop at a nonprofit. Listed on an ADP Workforce Now portal, not exactly a website your teenager has bookmarked.

Jobs for College Students: Making the Summer Count

When your kid comes home from college for the summer, the stakes are a little different. They need experience that connects to where they’re headed. They need to build a résumé and start figuring out what kind of work they actually want to do. And they need to learn that the stuff they studied in a classroom looks very different when there’s a real customer, a real deadline, or a real boss on the other end.

Digital Customer Enablement Intern at H.B. Fuller, St. Paul, Minnesota. A paid 12-week program, late May through mid-August. The listing calls out interaction with managers, directors, and the CEO, plus a final presentation to showcase what they’ve learned. Looking for students in business, marketing, communications, or data science. Posted on H.B. Fuller’s Workday career page, a great company most students have never heard of.

Summer Intern (Onsite) at Grand Design RV, Middlebury, Indiana. Seasonal. Grand Design is one of the biggest RV manufacturers in the country, right in the heart of Elkhart County. For a student interested in manufacturing, engineering, or operations, this is an unbelievable opportunity sitting in their own backyard. Posted on ApplicantPro, a hiring platform that rarely gets indexed by the big aggregators.

Marketing Intern, Summer 2026 at Toshiba America Business Solutions, Lake Forest, California. June 15 through August 7, $20/hour. A structured internship at a major tech company, posted on their own career site and linked through an UltiPro portal.

Corporate Summer Internship Program at Penske, Reading, Pennsylvania. A full corporate internship at a Fortune 500 logistics company. This was posted on penske.jobs, a dedicated hiring subdomain that most students wouldn’t think to visit.

Sales Intern, Summer at Schindler Elevator Corporation, Charlotte, North Carolina. A global company with 70,000+ employees, but this internship was buried in a SuccessFactors career portal. If you didn’t know to check job.schindler.com, you’d never find it.

Summer Intern, Software Engineer at HARMAN International, Novi, Michigan. HARMAN makes JBL, Harman Kardon, and Mark Levinson. For a computer science student home in Michigan for the summer, this is a dream. Posted on a standalone career subdomain most people don’t know exists.

Don’t Sleep on Local Government

I want to call this one out specifically because I think it’s one of the most overlooked sources of summer jobs anywhere.

Cities, counties, and park districts hire seasonal workers every year. The pay is often better than retail. The work is real: outdoor, physical, meaningful. And the postings almost never make it to Indeed or LinkedIn.

The City of Greensburg, Indiana had three summer positions open at the same time: Street Department, Wastewater Department, and Water Department. All paying $18–$20/hour. To apply? Download a PDF from the city website and email it to a specific person at City Hall. That’s it. If you didn’t know to look there, you’d never know the job existed.

The City of South Bend posted a part-time Greenskeeper at the Studebaker Golf Course and a Seasonal General Laborer for Wastewater. Purdue University listed a Summer Grounds Worker for students. Greencroft Communities in Goshen (a senior living campus) had summer Grounds positions with hourly rates that beat most retail jobs.

These are the kinds of jobs where your kid comes home with dirt on their boots, a sunburn, and the satisfaction of having done something real. They’re learning to operate equipment, work on a crew, take direction from a supervisor, and show up at 7 a.m. when every fiber of their being wants to sleep in.

That’s not just summer employment. That’s growing up.

What We’re Really Teaching Our Kids

I’ll be honest. This part matters more to me than any of the job listings above.

When I think about why I want my kids to work in the summer, it’s not really about the paycheck. It’s about what happens around the paycheck. They learn that time has value. They open a bank account and start to understand what it means to save, to budget, to make choices about how to spend their own money. They learn that when someone is counting on you to be there at 8 a.m., you can’t just roll in at 8:15 because you were up late.

They learn that some jobs are hard. That some days are long. That your feet hurt and you’re hot and the customer is being difficult and you have to handle it anyway, because that’s what adults do. And at the end of that day, they feel something that no video game or social media feed can replicate: the quiet pride of having done something that mattered.

For our teenagers, summer work is often their first real taste of the adult world. For our college students, it’s the bridge between what they’re studying and what they’ll actually do for a living. Both of these experiences are invaluable. And as a community, we should be doing everything we can to make them accessible.

Let’s Make It Easier Together

Here’s my ask, and I’m talking to everyone: parents, employers, chambers, community leaders.

Parents, start the conversation now. The best summer positions fill early. If your chamber of commerce partners with Rollie, check their job board first. If they don’t yet, ask them about it. And don’t overlook the obvious: your city’s parks department, your local YMCA, the county government website. The jobs are there. They’re just not where you’d normally look.

Students, don’t just search LinkedIn and call it a day. The most interesting opportunities are often at companies you’ve never heard of, posted on career pages you’ve never visited. Be willing to try something outside your major and outside your comfort zone. The skills you build matter more than the name on the building.

Chambers and EDOs, your members are hiring for summer right now, and a lot of them are struggling to fill positions because the openings aren’t visible. You’re already connected to these employers. Rollie gives you the tools to surface their opportunities automatically, every week, from every career page, no matter what platform they use. That’s a real service you can provide to the families in your community. Let’s talk about it.

Employers, post your summer positions early and make them easy to find. If your chamber partners with Rollie, make sure your career page is in the system. Our AI agents will handle the rest.

Summer is almost here. The opportunities are out there. Real jobs at real companies, posted right now, waiting for someone to find them. As parents, we want our kids to have the kind of summer that teaches them something they can’t learn in a classroom. As a community, we have the tools to make that happen.

Let’s roll into summer together.

Chris Frederick is the founder of RollieJobs, a hyperlocal job intelligence platform that helps chambers of commerce and economic development organizations surface employment opportunities from their member companies, including the ones that never reach the big job boards. Learn more at rolliejobs.com.