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The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

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Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#41

Post by tpmx »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #21

Well for all the broohaha from the "YOU DONT NEED COLLEGE" folks the reality is still that trades are very underpaid unless you run your own business and your body will break down doing physical labor for 8+ hours a day.

In e.g. Scandinavia:

The salary difference between say a software dev and a trade worker is pretty small (perhaps 30% less after taxes).

The body breaking down aspect is still an issue. Younger people in these fields seem a lot more aware though - they're practically health freaks compared to your stereotypical 50-ish somewhat round trade worker with back pain issues.

I guess we'll have to wait and see how that generation fares with 4.5 decades of phyical work. Japan is probabably the place look at for research.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#42

Post by garciansmith »

seydor wrote: post #18

A lot of this is due to the ancient nature of construction. Allow experimentation with new materials. Allow robots, prefabs etc. I m sure genz would love to program your 3d home printer or assemble your ikea home. They are not lazy, but forward thinking. Who wants to become a plumber when that job may be automated in 10 years

Plumbing strikes me as one of the very last manual jobs that will be automated, if ever. Every plumbing issue, even the most basic, is different due to the fittings and hardware being used.

For example, I've been putting off hiring a plumber to replace the old drum trap behind my bathtub with a p-trap. I can't even fathom how a robot would go about doing such a thing when a plumber needs to sit there and think about how to do this: open access, judge where the pipes are going (without even seeing some of them), the amount of space, whether they'll need more space and cut in from the ceiling below, etc.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#43

Post by UncleMeat »

nostrademons wrote: post #24

Tradespeople will be the new software engineers in the late 2020s through 2030s. Enough that I'm considering leaving my cushy FAANG engineering manager job to become an electrician. On top of the huge supply shortage, consider that the majority of the U.S. housing stock was built during the Baby Boom suburbanization from 1950-1970, and that the average lifespan of a house's internal systems (plumbing, electrical) is…

Tradespeople will definitely not be making 300k+ off a few years of experience five years from now.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#45

Post by frou_dh »

seydor wrote: post #18

A lot of this is due to the ancient nature of construction. Allow experimentation with new materials. Allow robots, prefabs etc. I m sure genz would love to program your 3d home printer or assemble your ikea home. They are not lazy, but forward thinking. Who wants to become a plumber when that job may be automated in 10 years

4D chess in lieu of 3D printing opportunities?

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#46

Post by burkaman »

barbazoo wrote: post #20
bruceb wrote: post #7

[flagged]

I might be misunderstanding what you're saying but are you implying that journalists are somehow responsible for fixing the issues they report on?

I think they are imagining a world where journalism is as well-paid and comfortable as the tech industry, and therefore it's somehow hypocritical for journalists to cover less comfortable industries. I don't really think it's worth responding to to be honest.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#48

Post by eddsh1994 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #33

"We need more tradespeople" seems to be an evergreen news article. My brother in law is an electrician. He is paid alright, enough to live on. But there are HUGE downsides. He does not receive health insurance. He does not get paid vacation. In order to match decent white-collar pay, he needs to work overtime. His company pushes hard to get jobs finished fast, causing people to cut safety corners. Many of his coworke…

This is why Unions exist, no?

Personally I sometimes wonder if I'd have enjoyed plumbing water more than plumbing code as I'd be meeting more people face to face, physically active, and it can get surprisingly complex (Berkeley, I think, offers a postgrad cert in plumbing buildings like sky scrapers which I saw advertised the other day)

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#49

Post by bavent »

malandrew wrote: post #8
Ancalagon wrote: post #4

Same labor shortage as everywhere that the government likes to pretend doesn't exist. 10 million working-age men can't or won't work. Of the ones willing to work, almost none want to spend their time learning skills for back-breaking, barely-middle class skills jobs which they'll be forced to retire from at 55 because their knees give out. Same answer for the shortage as everywhere that the economists don't want to h…

I’ve done both kinds of work on my own home. Calling it back breaking is pure hyperbole. Is it physical, certainly. But it’s something you can easily do until you’re 50 without issue and between 40 to 50, you can start taking apprentices that do the taxes that benefit from youth. Of the plumbers and carpenters I’ve hired, they are all in no worse shape than other adults their age. I sit at a computer all day and it’s…

Working on something at your house is very different from doing it day in and day out, year after year. I have worked many manual labor jobs over the years and after just a few years started having constant pain in my knees, feet, and lower back. My father has been in a trade his entire life and in his late 50s, he was already having many physical issues from it. Not everyone can just take on an apprentice - especially since this article is stating that nobody wants to do these jobs.

Re: The skilled trades haven't caught as a career choice with Gen Z

#50

Post by Adraghast »

modoc wrote: post #27
lemoncookiechip wrote: post #19

It's almost as if people are less willing to work jobs that actively harm their long-term physical health (back-breaking jobs) or those harmful for their mental health (generally ones face to face with customers, customer support or high stress jobs), for a relatively small wage to said job's demands and lasting effects.

Where are you finding small wage plumbers or carpenters? All the trades here (plumbing, electrical, HVAC, carpentry (perhaps more on the finish side vs framing though) are extremely expensive, with hourly rates between $80-$150/hour. (source - did a lot of renovations on my house, and my BIL is an electrician).

The median annual wage for electricians was $60,040 in May 2021. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $37,020, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $99,800.
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