It wasn’t a blue collar job, but many, many years ago when I worked at CompUSA corporate HQ (Remember them?), we switched from whatever inventory system we were using to SAP and all of us were trained. Once training was completed, we all got a raise, and I remember my director saying something to the effect of “You’ve all got new skills now. If we didn’t give you a raise you could easily go somewhere else to get one.”
Maybe it hasn’t been mentioned yet, but could it be that a lot of younger people haven’t wanted to go into the trades because they’ve been denigrated? We don’t typically hold blue collar workers in esteem and have been pointing young people for decades towards college as the one path to success.
I don’t they’ve been denigrated so much as marked lower class, in the social rather than economic sense. It’s really a mistake we make: historically, we’ve tried to push everyone up the class ladder, and then shrugged pur shoulders when some people failed into the trades. (This is not my own view.)
A smarter culture would value all necessary work, and try to prepare kids for everything and young adults for what best suited them.
I’ve often thought that I would have liked to be a farmer, but for an urban kid who scored well on tests, that would have horrified my teachers and parents in a way that being a mid-level bureaucrat wouldn’t have.
They would be horrified by you being an innovator figuring out how to reduce water consumption and pesticide use while doubling crop yields, but not by you becoming a useless parasite that society would be better off paying to stay home?
One, I think we should differentiate being the in the trades from owning a small business. If you own a painting business, you are an entrepreneuer, not a painter, even if you started out as a painter and even if you still work as part of your crew. If someone wants to own a small busniness, that is a very different career path that requires a very different skillset and degree of risk tolerance.
Second, everyone talks about showing up on time and working hard, but I think it’s more than that: career success, in whatever you do, relies on a certain mindset in terms of learning skills and seeing how to use them to move on to additional roles. There are people who can work a job for 10 years and not learn a single thing outside of their assigned duties, and there are people who can work a job for 10 months and be ready to step into any role they have regular contact with. I like how “kids these days” have a better sense of work life balance and not taking on more work without more pay, but evey career advancement I’ve had has come from willingly taking on extra work without extra pay–when it taught me how to do something new.
I feel like people who think like that generally end up okay, whereever they start (provided they have some sort of safety net to catch them during inevitable periods of bad luck) and people who don’t think like that often really struggle to get ahead unless they are extraordinarily lucky.
Finally, it’s exempt jobs that don’t pay overtime, not salaried jobs. There is a lot of overlap betweeen those two, but they aren’t the same.
That’s true - but it’s also kind of a one-way thing. You can absolutely be an electrician , plumber, painter etc without owning your own business - but you have to start down the career path of learning to be a plumber before you can own your own plumbing business.
I think there’s so much overlap that there really isn’t any difference - I’ve known a lot of people (including me at some jobs) whose pay is quoted as $X per week or per year but none of them were truly salaried. If they had no PTO left and were sick two days, they wouldn’t be paid for those two days. Exempt jobs can’t do that.
Yea but if its not exempt and they dont pay OT, its grounds for a lawsuit. Some have actually been successful. I recognize that’s a hard path to take, but at the very least we should not spread the wage theft enabling myth that no salaried job is eligible for OT
That of course was not it worked at Microsoft. There was some abuse around deadlines but my son found it a pretty good place to work for. They were well paid even during the initial training period. He wrote a book on his experiences titled, Proudly Serving my Corporate Masters.
A corp certainly may be humane. But it doesn’t have to be. And in US practice seemingly rarely is.
I’ve known other early MSFT employees, even ones that did not get windfalls, and in general they praised the experience of working there.
I personally have no deep connection there, but my sense is that Bill Gates, warts and all, is an admirable character and was, and still is, a net positive for the world.
There are one- and two-year certificate programs. Some require a bachelor’s degree first and some don’t. One place to check is your local community college. I was surprised to find that ours had certificates for electron microscopy. One for using the machines and another for repairing them. They warn that you’ll probably have to get your first job out of state.
My wife and I both got lucky. We both worked our asses off though.
I ‘visited’ college (one semester). My path was mechanical engineering. Did not turn out like I thought it would and I withdrew. Did not know what I wanted.
BUT my 3 years of drafting class in high school landed me a job. And then another job. And then another. And another. Most of it in mapping/cartography/surveying. At that point GIS (computer mapping, Geographic Information Systems) just took off. There where no degrees for this at the time. But draftsman/cartographers where in great demand. As where anyone that had knowledge or familiarity with computers. Which I did.
I got lucky, but I worked my ass off. Shift work a lot of the time in GIS data conversion, and holding a second job with good 'ole regular drafting.
My Wife also got lucky, but she has a degree in a totally unrelated field. A degree in something I did not know existed - Outdoor Recreation. Huh. That sounds kinda fun. She did a lot of YMCA type kids camp work, but eventually ended up as a property appraiser. She worked her way up in county government. But she does work here ass off too. During a re-appraisal year, she has worked 70-80 hours a week. It’s insane.
But we made it. Me with no degree, my wife with a totally unrelated degree. It can be done.
It could be done. If in not mistaken, you’re close to retirement. It’s incredibly unlikely anyone could take a path like yours today.
Heck, even over 20ish years; I happen to know a CTO in a very large multinational who has a college diploma but no university degree and he’s flat out admitted that his company would never hire him nowadays the way they did back then. The most entry-level job requires a bachelor’s.
I work with people who have technical credentials (engineering technologist) doing similar work as people with engineering degrees, but they’re all 40+. None of the companies I know of would hire someone without and engineering degree for those roles anymore, despite the entire team of people who prove that the degree isn’t the most relevant qualification. That said, these people are more restricted in salaries and promotions.
I know one woman who, in the 80s, was allowed to work part time so she could spend more time with her kids. An amazing work life balance, and she is now in an incredibly senior position and credits the employer flexibility for loving her career.
Conversely, I know someone who needed to adjust her work hours when her husband left her, to have shorter hours the week she had the young kids but longer days the alternate week (in the past 5 years). It causes controversy and ended up going to the VP level for permission, because “it’s not fair to others”.
The work landscape just isn’t what it was. No amount of “working hard” will get you past shitty corporations and policies. The computer says you need a degree, that’s it, no matter what you do nowadays.
Sorry, Canada. This individual has a diploma in computer programming from the cégep system in Quebec,which, while being post-secondary is not equivalent to university.
Briefly; high school ends at grade 11, people who are university bound do a 2 year cégep program, then most non-professional degrees at university are 3 years. Or, they can do a 3 year diploma at cégep in certain fields.
Twenty years ago many, if not most of the IT veterans we had at our company did not have four year degrees. They would have been hired in the 1970s or 80s. Many had either community college AAS degrees or had completed a trade school (like DeVry at the time). Some trained by NCR the cash register company.
Right now, our IT department is staffed 100% with university degree holders, most of them in Computer Science or Computer Information Systems. We probably haven’t hired a non-degreed person in IT for decades.
Two years ago we’d be thrilled if someone from Rutgers or UMass applied. Now we are getting applicants from Rice and Georgia Tech.
That sounds like cégeps are similar to what we would call community colleges, though not exactly analogous. For one thing, while taking a couple of years at a community college and then transferring to a full university is one possible path, it’s far from universal. And usually the documentation you’d get from a community college is still called a degree, specifically an “associate’s degree” (which is less than a bachelor’s, but enough for some jobs).
And although there are community college prograns that don’t end in a degree, they don’t call the document showing that you completed the program a “diploma” but rather a “certificate” .
And their bodies are mostly done at this point. That’s a tough place to be.
That’s getting tougher as companies consolidate or are bought up by conglomerates. The hometown brand name may still be there, but the owners have already sold out to a private equity firm and are drawing a normal salary as they wind down to retirement. That leaves no pathway for the foreman or supervisors to advance to an ownership position. It’s also possible the owners put an exorbitant price on the perceived value of their brand, one which is out of reach of anyone but private equity, let alone an employee. This is ramping up in the HVAC, plumbing, and electrical industries. It’s been de rigeur for a while for doctors, and it’s spilling out into dentistry and veterinarians too. Late-stage capitalism baby!
To some extent I’m sure. But also the romantic notion of a lot of trade jobs is quickly peeled away to reveal spending day in and day in dirty, very cold, or very hot conditions, always on your feet, or bending over, at filthy construction sites, having to drive across town constantly, and getting little chance to recover. If I spend eight hours photographing a sporting event in the middle of summer I’m completely spent the next day, and I’m not even doing the sport. Someone in road construction is out there five or more days in a row and working a lot harder too. Kudos to them but there’s no way I could do that.