I have read a few articles in the past few months which suggested many young people are skipping college and going for trade jobs. You need college to be a doctor or lawyer (nitpickers back off). Maybe an accountant. But apart from some professional degrees we see more and more that college is a baaad investment. Unless mom and dad pay for it (and even then) you come out with a generic degree and fight for a job a few thousand with the same kind of degree want too (and, FTR, I have that generic degree but it was a better time back then BUT…it was getting certified as a Novell engineer that launched me on a MUCH better paying path).
My college education was definitely not worthless but it didn’t get me a good job in a time when it was supposed to. And, it has only gotten worse since then.
So, it makes perfect sense for some 18-year-old to decide they do not want to pay $100,000 for a degree that does not help get a job and make money and, instead, become (say) a welder which can be a very good job.
Or can it? No doubt some few make a lot of money. I suspect it is mostly knowing the right people to get a job but, certainly, there are some who are exceptionally good at it and they succeed too (same as any job)
Then I saw this:
The 10 worst entry-level jobs
Welder
Computer Numeric Control Machine Programmer
Mechanical Drafter
Automotive Mechanic
Boilermaker
Emergency Dispatcher
Architectural Drafter
Telecommunications Technician
Benefits Administrator
Tool and Die Maker
Granted it says entry level but still…these numbers are REALLY bad. Not saying college and its cost is better but…is this better?
Anecdotally my (now) ex father-in-law was an electrician. And a good one (I am no expert but have good reason to believe it)…did it his whole life. And that was (roughly) 1960s - 2010s (ish). And I know he had a lot of downtime between jobs. He would strip copper wire in his garage to make ends meet. But he managed and had a house and family (one of the best people I have ever known). And that was in the “good days”. FWIW he was union. That helped him a little but not sure how much (a whole other question but he was all union).
Again, I 100% get young adults choosing trade jobs but when everyone does it there simply are not enough jobs to go around.
I’m not sure I have a question at this point except to ask are these kids (mostly) screwed?
Or will things just somehow work out (I can’t see it)?
It’s getting tough to pick a job that’ll maximize enjoyment and money where everything is outsourced and now probably about to be replaced by AI. I don’t know what I’d tell someone entering post-secondary school to focus on in order to feel safe for decades. I’m not sure if healthcare is going to work if the Boomers are mostly dead in another decade.
Besides, of course, social media influencer.
Maybe something with a security clearance is a good plan.
Entry level doesn’t necessarily mean much. What are the journeyman prospects for those jobs?
As an example, up until about 4 years ago, entry level airline pilots were eligible for food stamps, and many of them were on food stamps to feed their family. In a job where a mid-career journeyman makes upwards from $300K.
I do not buy the idea that there will be no work for humans. At least not until there’s a volume of progress in AI and in robotics that seem pretty miraculous from where both those technologies are today.
I also do not buy the obsolete idea of one skillset used at one employer for life. That was already the career exception for people my age, and I’m now retired.
IMO the critical thing to seek is a skillset that prepares you to keep learning new skillsets. In work that must be done locally wherever. The old saying about not being able to offshore plumbing. They’re sure able to offshore the manufacture of plumbing fixtures; but not their installation.
if you’re not willing to move to a different state and to change careers at least twice, well you are screwed. “Putting down roots” is only compatible with being an investor or a farmer. And maybe not even farming.
One of my good friends owns a small auto repair biz. He started his career changing oil at an auto dealership. Has ~8 employees, so not a mega-corp. He could keep another 8 busy, if only he could find them to hire. A well-trained mechanic with a couple years under their belt is paid about $150K/year. If they work at a decent pace. Whole lotta folks seem to want to wrench two hours, fuss w their phone two hours, smoke or vape MJ a couple hours, and have a leisurely lunch the other two. That might work for a corporate office droid, but it won’t work in a skilled trade.
One of my bros is in the building trades. He has the same complaint that actually working all day is not what many folks expect out of their job. But it is what their employers expect. Such as bro vs. his crewmen. That disconnect is hard to bridge.
It’s not that you don’t need to know things to be a CNC operator or welder. It’s that the things you need to know mostly aren’t things you learn in college (you can, especially at community colleges, but that’s not what most refer to as “going to college”). So if you’re not learning them at college, where are you learning them? On the job. That time you spend as an entry-level worker is the time that you’re learning your trade, and the money you’re earning while doing so, no matter how low, is more than the large negative amount you’re earning in college.
Are you saying there are no schools for these trades?
We’re not Germany (which I believe as some formalized system to learn trades…not sure how it works though). How many employers will hire you to learn on the job as (say) a welder and you naturally are slow and screw-up a lot? Not dumping on them…learning takes time and practice. If the person is not paying to learn the skill at a school who is absorbing the cost to teach them?
And then, once trained, the person leaves for Company-B who didn’t incur the time and training cost and pays them a bit more. Not a good business strategy.
ETA: Anecdotally this happened a lot at a company I used to work for. For the salespeople the company had a notoriously brutal training program. Not quite Glengarry Glen Ross level but kinda close (I have zero proof but I am willing to bet that movie was a guiding light for that training). Those few who made it through were ace salespeople. It was not uncommon for competitors to buy them away from our company. They’d have to promise them more but they never had to deal with paying for a successful (if brutal) training program (and it was really tough). One reason I will never be a salesman.
Somehow it still worked because there was no shortage of wannabes lining up outside the door. It was a machine and enough stayed that made the cut that it worked. Boy was it awful though.
One of my pilot pals has a GF who has ~21yo daughter. Daughter is about to complete a 2-year trade school in auto mechanic. She’d fiddled around waiting tables after HS for a couple years then realized she’d never be able to afford to move out from Mom on those wages.
It’s certainly not college, and it certainly does have a tuition. And two years of opportunity cost in the wages not earned in some lesser job. But assuming she learned anything and has any sort of work ethic, she’ll be well-employed once she graduates with her certification.
There are (at both the high school and college level), but not everyone takes advantage of them. And if you’re hired at entry level, that probably means that you haven’t been to one of these schools (if you had, you’d probably start at a somewhat higher level), and at the start, your job duties probably include a lot of things like lifting and carrying.
I’m willing to bet her being female will help her getting a job as an auto mechanic.
I DO NOT mean that she gets hired because she is “cute” and I will also assume she learns her trade well and is as competent as the next guy. I just think if there are five people of equal talent applying for one job spot and one of them is female she’ll probably get it.
I am 100% fine with that. I hope more women get into the trades. Remember WWII and Rosie the Riveter. Literally changed the US…maybe the world.
My grandson recently graduated from Chippewa Valley Technical College. He was in a one year program resulted in the class building an entire house from the ground up. The cost of the school included a full tool layout and they partnered with local contractors. He was hired very quickly by a company that builds movie sets (after turning down a job offer to do roofing). So schooling really helps in the trades, especially since many shops are union.
Entry-level jobs don’t mean that you will necessarily spend a life sweating and scraping for a paycheck. There are paths to management and even ownership. I started as an electrician in the Navy and moved into more and more leadership positions. That all translated into good-paying positions in the civilian world. It doesn’t happen overnight, of course. I know that young folks these days want to be dragging down big bucks in short order, but that’s not the norm and never has been.
At a big corporation, sure. They have an HR department, are subject to EEOC reporting, etc. At a small shop like in my other anecdote, probably not. The boss is probably a male chauvinist and so are all the workers. At a dealership? Hard to say which effect predominates.
I know when it comes to airplane mechanics and other sorta-skilled manual jobs, the airlines are falling over themselves to hire any/every woman they can find. Which ain’t many as a percentage of the current crop of newbies, much less as compared to their very homogenous existing workforce.
Do you think that career path exists today? And, if it does, how many people can do the same?
I have no problem starting at the bottom with the menial shit. I did it and I think most people do. I suspect most Harvard Law grads, even recruited with high salaries, do the shit jobs to start. It is the way of the world and, it actually makes sense. Education is all well and fine but experience is where it is at.
Auto mechanics do not start working on Ferrari Formula 1 racing cars. They start by sweeping the shop and emptying the garbage mostly.
I’m just not sure those career paths are aplenty anymore. Sure, some will do it but thousands will not.
That sort of path most certainly does exist. Is that funnel wide enough for everyone in the country to end up as upper management in a big construction company? No. But that was also true 20 and 40 and 60 years ago.
The USA has always had a long list of low-paying jobs. Shop clerk at Sears, or at a small retailer on Main Street, in 1955 did not pay the big bux.
A lot of what seems to have happened is a lot of folks got sold the bill of goods that jobs in the real world are like jobs on TV. A laff a minute and there’s plenty of wages for nice clothes and fancy hair and a spacious apartment. And there’s one manager for every couple workers, not every couple dozen, so the pyramid seems a lot flatter than it really was/is.
Fair enough. I agree and it is certainly a male world but I think, on balance, being female will give her an edge. Her downside is working in a blue collar male dominated world. Doubtless she will have to deal with/tolerate a lot of shit. She will need thick skin. I am not saying that is right or fair but likely to be something she must cope with.
Assuming she is good at her job (and every reason to think she can be) then I expect she will succeed if she can put up with her likely mostly male colleagues.
What would be really cool is if, somewhere down the road, she opened her own shop all staffed by women. If they are as competent as any other shop in town and priced competitively I’d go if only to support that whole notion. That’s a long-term goal though.
I think it does, but not for everyone. You have to have some brains working for you as well as skills. I ended up in the military because of circumstances of the time, not because I wanted to be there. I was yanked out of my benign college boy existence and thrust into that world. But I was able to turn it to my benefit, mainly because I was smarter than a lot of the people around me. If I had stayed in college, who knows what I would have ended up doing. I was a psych major, for crying out loud.
Anyway, as far as trade and other jobs go, schooling is still important. Without it, you have no credentials. My youngest son, which is a smart person, passed on college because he was “tired of school”. He then spent 17 years in retail, hating every minute of it, and now works for an insurance company, which he also hates.
The best way to cope with all that bullshit is to outperform everyone around you if at all possible. You can’t argue with dedication and talent.
this is the real question. I mean, a first year resident can be considered an “entry level doctor”, and they may be making as little as $50/yr, which is of course not bad in a vacuum, but would be considered a paltry return on an education that cost $400k or more. What are someone’s career prospects in these trades though, that is the far more pertinent question.
A local community college advertises scaffolding and some entries here demonstrate it. Find an agreeable type of work - social, personal, educational inputs help folks make their choice - and start studying a part of it. See where it goes. EMTs and CNAs earn money learn the field and become nurses, PAs, and some become docs.
Or learn not to hate what you do - several refrences there in this topic too.
My family is lousy with doctors (in four continents) and not one of them wasn’t in the top 10% of earners by age 35.
I know lots of 40 and 50 year old electricians and carpenters who are just barely getting by. I also know a few who have three houses and lots of luxury cars. They are the ones who started employing other electricians and carpenters when they were in their 30s.
It’s getting hard to access the good union electrician and carpenter jobs here already. One of my daughter’s classmates from middle school went through the vocational high school electrical program and is an IBEW Apprentice now. She says she might graduate to the next level (journeyman?) in 10 years, maybe 12.
And if she eventually gets her own shop, it’ll probably help her get business. Too many mechanics are still hostile to women, and there are plenty of single women with their own cars who don’t want to take their car to such a shop.
Certainly, the biggest money comes when you own your own business. Of course, that also both means risk, and doing other kinds of work than the work you’re in the business of doing: Skill at things like managing payroll and balancing the budget are very different from skills like fixing leaking pipes or running wiring. Get successful enough, and you might end up not spending any of your time fixing cars or nailing boards or whatever, but instead being a full-time manager for the people actually doing those things.
Most women who went to work in WWII worked in “traditional” women’s work, such as secretarial work, nursing, etc. Armies, corporations, and government bureaucracies run on paper, and the war created a huge need for secretarial work. Rosie, and her Canadian equivalent, Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl, were awesome, but more the exception than the rule.
The picture we often associate with Rosie: woman in kerchief, flexing and looking at us, often with the caption “We Can Do It!” is not the actual Rosie the Riveter poster, which was done by Norman Rockwell, and has Rosie eating her lunch with her foot resting on a copy Mein Kampf.