Only thing I would add about working in the Trades is focusing on eventually owning your own business.
If you work for a company that repairs A/C units and heaters or you work as a plumber for a Plumbing company, you are just not going to be ever able to make “real” money. You will be making “good” money $20 to $30 or more an hour, but not nearly the money you could make if you were working for yourself. Go ahead a work a few years for a Trades company until you know what you are doing and also pay attention to how the owner runs things, then start out for yourself.
Owning the business is not for everyone. Hours are long, new customers constantly have to be found and when things go wrong, the buck stops with you, but the rewards are great if you have the drive and personality for it.
I’ve owned a Trades company for almost 30 years and have earned over six figures a far back as I can remember. Down turns in the economy are just little speed bumps along the way. Even during recessions people need crap to be done that they either don’t know how to do or just don’t want to do.
Rick, that is completely freaking awesome. I know Mike Rowe has some deep respect for the “working man” but I didn’t know he had gone to this point with it. (I did know about the growing skilled labor shortage, that’s not news)
You are wildly over romanticizing trade jobs. You can do well as long as you are strong and healthy but you had better be owning your own business at some point or the existence can be very tough and physically wearing as a tradesperson day worker. If you aren’t a “take charge”, self motivating kind of person, and you really aren’t coming across that way in your OP, becoming a tradesperson isn’t going to solve your life issues.
There are lots of things a person with 4 year degree can do other than driving a bus. If that’s the only viable career option where you are you need to pick yourself up and move elsewhere.
,.
Around here, you can’t get a GED until you are eighteen. So dropping out of high school to start trade school isn’t an option. BUT, you can convince your guidance counselor to co-enroll you in trade school and high school.
My son is a Senior in high school and heading off to trade school next year. It was a battle to get him off the “college track” at school. I think its more about not shutting doors on a kid who is fourteen - and may want to go to college at eighteen but doesn’t right now - than thinking college is for everyone. You need to get through certain coursework to get into a four year college…and deciding as a Senior that you want to go isn’t going to get you three years of foreign language. Discovering as a Senior that your only option is community college might discourage you from going at all - particularly if one of the drivers for college is your friends talking about how much fun dorm living is going to be (not a great first step for successful college, but it ups a high school college enrollment numbers).
(Astro is right in that a lot of trade jobs are hard on your body. The advice we’ve given our son is start in the trades, and figure out which of the stand around with a clipboard and phone jobs you want when you are 40 - inspector? business owner? site supervisor? Because you don’t want to be hauling boxes of tile and down on your knees grouting for 40 years of a career. (and yes, those jobs are all a lot more than stand around with a phone and a clipboard). A college degree - or even some college, then into the trades, will set you up for one of those paths).
OP - do what you want to now. Being bitter because you finished high school and went to college seems like a colossal waste of energy now. It comes across as whiny now - many people back up and re-start their careers a few times.
I know a lot of people that went the trade route, but most finished high school first. Those that did not, anecdotally, do regret not at least getting that done. Like it or not, not getting your diploma is not usually looked at as a “positive, self-starter that knew what they wanted”.
Seize the day, follow your heart and all that jazz. Good luck.
And here I am in the opposite boat of Xillix. I went to a college prep high school, actually took college level classes while in High School. When I graduated, I decided to take a year off of school. No one in my family ever went to college, they were all in various trades and did well for themselves. They always complained about the “college idiots” that were hired to supervise them. At the time, I wanted to go to college, but I also wanted some real world experience and some time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.
After graduating, I managed to get a union job that paid well. It wasn’t very fulfilling, so I started looking for something else. When I told my family that I was quitting the union job to work for an Ambulance district at half the pay, they were mortified. I loved the job and found that it wasn’t EMS that I liked so much as the whole Public Safety field. I bounced between EMS, Fire and Law Enforcement before ending up in dispatch. The lazy part of me liked dispatch because I was warm in the winter and cool in the summer, but I figured out that my experience in the various fields I was dispatching made me really good at what I do. Fast forward several years and I am now the #2 person in management. My lack of a degree never seemed to cause me a problem.
Then the #1 person retired. I was named the “interim” #1 and asked by the board to apply for the position. I ended up not getting the position because? Yep, I don’t have a degree!
It seems that a degree is very important to the board of directors, who all have degrees. At this point in my life, I don’t think I have the patience to go back for a degree, but I have been kicking myself in the rump for the last month for not seeking that degree when I had the youth and energy to do so.
I still love my job and usually look forward to going to work more days than not. But knowing that a few years of schooling is now holding me back is really getting to me.
I probably have no real clue about these things, having been a white-collar worker for my entire career.
That said, the father of my roommate in grad school was a tradesman, specifically in installing flooring and carpeting. By the time that I got to know him, he was in his early 50s – his knees were shot, from 30 years of working while kneeling, and his hands weren’t in much better shape. At that point, he was running his own contracting business, and had younger employees who were doing most of the installations, since he simply wasn’t physically capable of doing it any longer.
I agree with this very strongly. I went to college for a computer science degree, which is what I use for my career, but I’m very happy that I also learned things in the areas of anthropology, biology, psychology, and several other fields that I otherwise may not have look into on my own.
Reminds me of this one Thai lady I was acquainted with in Thailand. She and her husband wanted to send Junior off to Business school in the West, preferably in the US but anywhere in the West would do. But they could not find a school – at least, not a halfway decent one – that would let him study just Business and nothing but Business. She moaned about them all making their little darling study History and Literature and Science and all this good stuff. She demanded to know why he could not just study Business alone and be done with it. I informed her it was because if her precious little snookums studied nothing but Business, all the other international businessmen they were envisioning he’d be dealing with would view him as nothing more than a crass moron.
Sure, not quite the same thing here, but it reminded me of the incident. And I insist it makes you a better person. You don’t need a college degree to dig ditches, but even if I were a ditch digger, I’d still rather have a “useless” degree than not have one.
I’m sympathetic with the OP. I’ve been there as well, and it’s a frustrating place. The transition from university to adulthood can be an extraordinarily tough one.
But the real issue here is that the OP isn’t going to have much success until he develops some maturity. He seems unfocused, unwilling to do unpleasant but necessary tasks, and in a blame-others mindset. No matter what the circumstances, that’s not a mindset that is going to get you anywhere. The issue isn’t the particular path the OP is on, but rather that the OP is taking said path aimlessly, with little ownership and no defined goal.
I don’t know what the secret is to getting past that. It may just be a matter of time and experience. But I’d suggest the OP do some real soul searching about what his goal really is. Once you understand your goal, it becomes a lot easier to plot a viable path to get there.
[Quote=RAH]
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
― Robert A. Heinlein
[/quote]
You should give him/her a break. You can’t expect youngsters to make the best decisions when everybody (schoolteachers, parents…) is pushing hard in the opposite direction. S/he’s definitely rigfht to blame them.
From my point of view, the blame lies squarely with our culture and expectations (I say “our” despite being French because the issue is the same over here. God forbid you’d go into trades if you’re any good at anything).
On top of which, I think that you in fact need to be quite smart to be any good in trades.
Germany seems to do a much better job at promoting trades and not making people who choose them feel like utter failures.
Sorry, but if you’re past 18yrs, and you’re blaming peer pressure, societal pressure, or parental pressure regarding your educational and life choices, you’re deluding yourself in my opinion.
If you don’t have the spine to strike an independent course, even when not doing so requires you over ride your own strong feelings and intuition, you have no grounds for complaint when you find your square self jammed into a round hole.
And playing the, “I coulda been a …”, game is immature and beyond delusion if you didn’t have the will to go against expectations at the time. No, you clearly could NOT have.
You gotta own your part in stuff if you ever want to get past the ‘woulda, shoulda, coulda’s’, in my experience.
Ah, yes, similar to the Chinese approach. Maybe you know everything about Martensite formation in ultra high strength steel, but you can’t point out Great Britain on a map, you know, despite the whole Hong Kong thing and Opium Wars and all.
I got a computer science degree and worked in IT for years. I always kept moving on after 2-3 years. Every time I was convinced that it was the company. If I could just find the right company. Then two things happened. First, I found the best company and I wasn’t happy. And I thought if I can’t be happy here maybe it isn’t the company maybe it is the job. The second even was the war in Afghanistan happened and I heard the call to arms so I joined the army. I enjoyed being in the army although I’m not sure it really was the perfect fit for me. I enjoyed leading troops, I enjoyed being responsible for their welfare but I’m more suited to working with my mind then my body. I got injured and medically released so I went back to school.
Now I’m a researcher and I’m truly happy. I’m especially pleased with my newest line of research in using AI to help plant physiologists feed the world. I may be a little cog in a big machine but the idea that what I’m doing might someday feed a hungry person fills me with total joy. The only thing missing is teaching. I love teaching. I teach a few classes and mentor some students, but what I really want is a professorship so I can teach and mentor more. But I’ve definitely found my niche in life.
I think we all have one, sometimes it takes a few careers to find it.
I managed to earn my Computer Science degree before the stupid college ruined it.
I focused on business. My minor is in business and I took Accounting electives. My CS classes included two semesters of COBOL. I did take some theory classes that I hated. Compilers, Operating Systems, Data Structures (actually a useful class).
I got a steady job. My speciality is HR and Payroll systems. Been at it for almost 25 years.
You can’t get that degree at my old school now. Computer Science requires a math minor. They sneer at COBOL or any business programing. It’s all about the SCIENCE of Computers now. All kinds of worthless crap. There’s little real programming. Instead they write pieces of code to illustrate some theory.
I’ve seen recent graduates get hired in my shop. They are just hopeless. Give them a dirt simple project. Read this sequential file, update some accounts and write a log history file. They can waste day on it and it’s still full of errors. It’s not their fault. It’s the crappy training they got in college.
Trust a college to take a useful degree that gets people employed. Then ruin it with a bunch of theory and no practical use in the job market. Unless you want to compete for a job with Google or Microsoft.
(not a great first step for successful college, but it ups a high school college enrollment numbers).