This is your summer to develop your teen leadership skills that will prepare you for life and college
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The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 highlights that leadership skills, resilience, and critical thinking are the most sought-after skills that employers struggle to find. These skills are developed through real-life experiences, personal accountability, and engaging challenges.
Summer break offers teenagers a valuable opportunity to focus on developing these practical leadership skills rather than simply accumulating credentials. Those who invest their time in leadership skill-building during the summer will enter college—and eventually the workforce—with far more valuable assets than just the name of a program on their resume.
Three summer experiences can help foster the key leadership skills essential for success in college, career, and life.
1. A Real Job With Real Stakes Builds Teen Leadership
Not an internship where a teen shadows professionals and sits in on meetings — a job with actual responsibilities, a manager to answer to, and consequences for underperforming.
When a teenager has to show up consistently, manage their time independently, and navigate workplace relationships without a teacher mediating the dynamic, they build the self-regulation and interpersonal skills that carry into college and beyond. The most in-demand skill profiles combine technical proficiency with strong communication, collaboration, and critical thinking — and employers consistently report that finding candidates with both is their greatest hiring challenge.
How to make this summer count:
- Prioritize roles with defined responsibilities over prestigious-sounding titles — a shift supervisor position at a local business teaches more than an unpaid corporate shadow program
- Ask the employer during the interview process what the teen will actually own, not just observe
- Set a weekly check-in with your teen focused on what went wrong, what they handled, and what they would do differently — that reflection habit turns experience into growth
- Resist the urge to intervene when things get hard — the friction is where the learning happens
3. Launching A Side Hustle Is One Of The Best Teen Leadership Experiences Available
Building something from scratch is one of the most effective experiences for developing teen leadership. Launching a product, a service, a creative venture: the decisions are real, the setbacks are real, and no one hands out partial credit for a good effort.
A Junior Achievement study found that 66% of teens ages 13 to 17 expressed interest in starting a business. High achievers in particular tend to have the drive and discipline to execute — what they typically lack is a structured environment that channels those qualities into something real. The WEF report makes clear that the most valuable employees will be those who combine technical capability with human skills that AI cannot replicate: creative thinking, leadership, resilience, and curiosity. A teen who has built and iterated on a real venture has practiced all four.
Programs like WIT — Whatever It Takes, a teen entrepreneurship and leadership program, are designed specifically for this profile. WIT, which I launched in 2009, places high-achieving teens in the role of entrepreneurs from day one, developing real business concepts, pitching for actual prize money, and receiving coaching from working professionals. The experience asks something of them that most summer programs never do: to lead, fail, adapt, and keep going.
How to get started:
- Start with a problem your teen is genuinely frustrated by — the best business ideas come from personal experience
- Set a 30-day target with a specific, small goal: one paying customer, one completed product, one public pitch — not a finished business plan
- Connect them with a structured program, mentor, or local entrepreneurship resource that provides accountability and real feedback, not just encouragement
- Treat setbacks as data — when something doesn’t work, ask your teen what they learned and what they would change, rather than dwelling on what went wrong
What To Look For In Any Teen Leadership Program This Summer
Before committing to any summer program, ask these four questions:
- Will my teen be responsible for a decision that affects others?
- Is there a defined outcome they are accountable for producing?
- Does the experience last long enough to require real follow-through? Or does it set them up to continue the impact after the program ends?
The summer experiences that actually build teen leaders are the ones that require the teen to take ownership and responsibility. High-achieving teens are ready for more than most programs offer them — and the ones who get real teen leadership skills development experience this summer will arrive at college and the workforce with something their peers don’t have: proof they can lead.
