That is a trade I would recommend to anyone who thinks they might like it. A lot of welding is on big heavy stuff that could never be shipped after welding, therefore it is impossible to outsource to places with cheaper labor. It takes a while to learn, and is just technical enough that it can’t be taken over by unskilled workers, and yet not such a “black art” that it can’t be learned by anyone with patience and determination.
A couple of downsides: A lot of the really well paying gigs will be temporary and involve travel…thinking pipelines, building refinery, that sort of thing. Not something a lot of people with families like, and young single guys need to be alert to not succoming to the temptations of the road. It is very easy to spend a whole paycheck chasing tail in a remote juke-joint.
Fumes and flash: A young guy needs to take care of his lungs and eyes if he is to have a long career.
Perhaps you missed the bit at the start where I said I was a vehicle mechanic ( qualified, with a bit of paper to say so ). As long as people drive cars/ motorbikes and need trucks, bulldozers, diggers etc etc I should be able to get a job in the automotive industry.
People can get by without music, if they have to, but in a society that has abandoned decent public transport in favour of the individual car, most people must have a car.
Dre who? Seriously, did musicians in the 50s and 60s need a degree to make some of the best music ever?
People have been making art for centuries without the need of a “qualification”
In Thailand, there are many many thousands of people employed in the “artistic” industry that never saw the inside of a school much beyond primary level.
Of course an art historian etc would need a degree, but just to produce music, art works, it might be nice to have, but essential- I doubt it.
As a tax payer, of course I pay for university education, and the more fanciful courses there are, the higher the tax take required.
One of the gripes I have with degree “education”, is that there is a constant push to make some “trades” degree level entry. As a registered nurse for 18 years I can say that a degree is absolutely not required for routine nursing ( I got in just before it was degreeified in my country ), Of course if you want to be a nurse specialist or nurse practitioner, then a degree might be necessary, but that can be obtained later.
One of the things that was very noticeable about new grads in nursing was that they had few practical skills, and took a long time to aquire those skills. Considering that nursing is a practical skill with a theoretical component, that is a problem.
BTW, I could have gone to England and walked into a nursing job the day after I qualified, but after nursing went “theoretical” it became necessary to have actually worked as a qualified nurse for a year to get a job in England.
Another thing, I was actually a patient in hospital for a serious condition, and I was astounded at how useless most of the nurses ( degree level ) were. The best nurse I had during my stay was the old school hospital trained nurse.
A couple of hundred bucks, most of which I ended up getting reimbursed due to a Samsung class action settlement. This was after Samsung paid for a free in-house repair that fixed the TV for a few months before it started having the same problem again.
Blue collar work also has this cultural stereotype of hot, uncomfortable, physically punishing factory labor (trade work is also seen as physically demanding, IIRC). Some people prefer “working out” at their job, but a lot of people prefer one where they just sit at a desk and surf the 'Net whenever they need a distraction. College helps with the latter, but not the former.
Here’s a nice symptomatic quote I found in the comment section of an article for the local newspaper (admittedly a hive of scum and villainy, as most Internet comment sections are):
True, it says nothing about trade school and training, but GEDs are supposed to be the equivalent of high school, right?
Just as white collar office work has a cultural stereotype of officious idiots lording over disinterested drones surfing the net all day and filling out TPS reports.
Ok a lot of white collar office work is actually like that. But a lot of it is actually pretty intellectually intensive.
How is taking pride in one’s education or professional career different from one taking pride in their tradecraft?
That’s an accurate statement. If you only have average to below average skills and education, why would you think the market should pay you an above average salary? People who make six figures generally work in jobs that require high education or some particular skill or qualifications that most people don’t have. Most trades require more than a high school degree / GED.
It’s true that a large part of the trades is physical, but there’s also a lot of mental work on any given day too.
Diagnosing problems, reading diagrams/blueprints, coming up with creative solutions to problems and that sort of thing.
As for the pay grade. Trades can pay quite well if you’re willing to relocate. I know where I live fully ticketed welders that run their own truck make $120+ per hour.
Automotive Mechanics make $30+, Heavy Duty Mechanics $40+, I believe Electricians are $35+, Carpenters and Plumbers usually make under $30 I believe but many of them (especially carpenters) end up opening their own business and seem to do alright.
I don’t know how that compares to the average university degree but it’s decent enough money to live on and have a bit of a life.
I think the issue with the physical work comes at the end of a career; even moderate physical activity can be brutal if you have a bad back or a bad knee, and while healthy living can mitigate that, it’s not foolproof. My dad fell three feet off a ladder and shattered his ankle when he was in his mid-to-late 50s. It was painful, and bothersome, and took years to heal properly. It had zero impact on his ability to make a living. If he’d been a tradesman, he might have been effectively retired at that point, and lost the highest earning ten years of his career. So many people have some sort of incident like that in their 50s or 60s.
Even if it’s just in the last couple years before retirement that age catches up to you, a couple years is a long damn time when your in them.
A lot of people bash DeVry and other “For-Profit” schools as being a travesty. True, they might not be the best deal for many people, but I think they serve a valuable purpose. Since the for-profit schools care more about making money and less on being seen as prestigious or racking up publications or discoveries, they are able to educate a lot of people who are willing to pay and willing to try but who get turned down elsewhere. Yes, there are concerns over standards and to what extent one is “paying for a degree” rather than working on it, but schools like DeVry are accredited and that does require standards.
Guy: “I don’t have the best background but I think I can learn and want to try for a degree.”
Traditional School: “Get lost, there are plenty of people with a 3.9 GPA and excellent recommendations clamoring for the spaces in our program.”
For-Profit School: “Sure. That’ll be $X for the first semester. Do well enough on the tests and assignments and that degree is yours. Do poorly, and you flunk out. We’re growing like mad. If you know any PhD’s, send their resumes to us because we’re going to need more instructors soon.”
In one sense you could say the trades are physical work, in that the practitioner works on or creates an actual physical object, but tradespeople are definitely not manual laborers. If you get the right group of tradespeople together and some workers to help them, plus the requisite tools and machinery, lumber, and so on, they can build you a house where there was a vacant lot before. I call that pretty impressive.
Wrong. The other day I had to move several very large and heavy concrete drain pipes up a slope. Had I just used brute force, they’d still be at the bottom. I had to use physics to be able to move them up the slope without damaging my body. Just a very simple example.
I heard about this man on NPR; this whole project seems somewhat more like a personal experiment, rather than someone just deciding to go completely off the grid and live like a wild man. And he’s a published author which has to count for something. One published book, I know, is not an E-ticket to a lifetime six-figure income, but it’s a promising sign that that he won’t ever have to ask anybody if they want fries with that.
Who are we to say if he would have been more successful, by any measure, in one of the more utilitarian fields?