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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

#171

Post by ghaff »

yucky wrote: post #120
joecot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a millennial. First we were told that we needed the college degree for a job. Any degree would do. So everyone went and got a college degree, and since so many people had it it wasn't a status symbol anymore, so that wasn't enough to get a good middle class job. And then a bunch of people were told they shouldn't have gotten those degrees and they were worthless. Then we were told to go into STEM. So lots of peop…

> we've been given the wrong advice for so long we just stopped listening. Shouldn't we recognize that things change and life can be unpredictable? Rather than being jaded that every adult in our lives didn't have a magical crystal ball, maybe there are more productive things that can be done? Gen Z & younger Millennials constantly get shit for blaming everyone else for everything always, and taking no responsibility…

I'm not even sure that all of the advice--with some nuance applied--is even bad today.

STEM is not a great term in general given how broad it is. The pure sciences as a career path for someone with just an undergrad degree have not been that great since I was in school which was a long time ago. Those degrees can be parlayed into other things that are connected to the degree--or not. Pre-med was the historical reason a lot of people majored in biology or chemistry.

Engineering broadly is not a bad degree to have even if you don't ultimately work in the area you majored in; I only did so for about three years.

Nursing was never near the level of doctors in terms of compensation. But it has been pretty much middle class pay at the cost of what, to me, would be difficult working conditions.

If someone's good with sitting in an office and developing some appropriate skills for that, I wouldn't necessarily recommend the trades. But, if someone doesn't like school, book learning, etc. it seems a pretty reasonable option.

And there are degrees of things. Trades also includes working for things like construction engineering firms. Have a friend who didn't go to college but has worked in various roles of this sort. (My one real mechanical engineering job wasn't all that different in many respects at the end of the day.)

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

#172

Post by renox »

maherbeg wrote: post #82
garciansmith wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think there's the additional question of "how often should we just replace a building"? I've unfortunately made the realization after remodeling our 60 year old house that we should have just torn the house down.

That depends on the construction material used for the house..

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

#173

Post by thevardanian »

yucky wrote: post #120
joecot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a millennial. First we were told that we needed the college degree for a job. Any degree would do. So everyone went and got a college degree, and since so many people had it it wasn't a status symbol anymore, so that wasn't enough to get a good middle class job. And then a bunch of people were told they shouldn't have gotten those degrees and they were worthless. Then we were told to go into STEM. So lots of peop…

> we've been given the wrong advice for so long we just stopped listening. Shouldn't we recognize that things change and life can be unpredictable? Rather than being jaded that every adult in our lives didn't have a magical crystal ball, maybe there are more productive things that can be done? Gen Z & younger Millennials constantly get shit for blaming everyone else for everything always, and taking no responsibility…

You expect kids to not heed the advice of the adults around them? And when those kids grow up to be adults and realize that the advice they were given was all bullshit to suddenly not see the utter waste of time and energy into worthless goals put before them their entire lives?

What are you talking about?

The main responsibility of adults is to prepare the next generation. Realizing that failure is not being jaded, it's confronting reality about the failures of adults.

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

#174

Post by dionidium »

joecot wrote: post #96
Avshalom wrote: post #36

A lot of these threads devolve into "have you tried paying more" but I'd also like to highlight "have you actually tried telling Gen Z that". I'm 35, from basically as early as I can remember until sophmore year of college I was told constantly by every adult (and I mean every adult not just the ones that had degrees) in my life to go to college, get a degree, any degree. So yeah I went to college. It was aggressivel…

I'm a millennial. First we were told that we needed the college degree for a job. Any degree would do. So everyone went and got a college degree, and since so many people had it it wasn't a status symbol anymore, so that wasn't enough to get a good middle class job. And then a bunch of people were told they shouldn't have gotten those degrees and they were worthless. Then we were told to go into STEM. So lots of peop…

> First we were told that we needed the college degree for a job. Any degree would do.

Something strange is happening here that I can't quite understand. Jokes about English majors asking if you want fries with that are way older than me and I first started college in 1999. Yes, I heard a persistent low rumbling of "go to college," but the idea that "any degree would do" is alien to me.

Of course I knew that some majors were more lucrative than others. Of course everybody else around me knew the same. Of course people my age at the time actively engaged in conversations about "what will you do with this degree when you're done?" Of course people who majored in less practical subjects thought about this (when they weren't actively trying to put it out of their mind).

A character (played by pre-hairplugs Jeremy Piven) in the movie PCU (released in 1994) ridicules a student for majoring in Sanskrit, saying, "You're majoring in a 5000 year-old dead language?" Everybody in the audience is supposed to get why that's funny.

And yet I keep hearing people say they had no idea that any of this was true. It strains credulity.

Frankly, people have been repeating this line about how they couldn't possibly have known all this for so long that kids in college today weren't even born yet when it started. Eventually people are going to have to admit that they did know (or should have).

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

#175

Post by quickthrowman »

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…

Your brother in law should join the IBEW (or leave Arizona or whatever state he is in that has weak unions) as union electricians receive all of the things he does not (I manage union electricians).

Is he doing residential wiring? That’s the bottom of the barrel for electrical work, unfortunately. The commercial market is where the bulk of the good work is.

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

#176

Post by stonogo »

bluedino wrote: post #133
Adraghast wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Get a job with the local power company, or one of their contractors. You will have to work in bad weather, after storms, and travel a little bit. The average salary for a journeyman lineman in Michigan is $161,000 per year

No it isn't. You cherry-picked that single report, which was based on 76 turbotax returns. I suspect their data is wrong or corrupted, because making $160k as a journeyman lineman is only achievable with a decade experience and a truckload of overtime. Look around a bit further, or talk to actual linemen or unions, and you'll see the average salary for a lineman is about a hundred thousand dollars a year less than that.

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/journeyman-... https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/DTE-Energy-Journeyman-Linem... https://www.linemancentral.com/states/michigan

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

#177

Post by throwaway5959 »

falcolas wrote: post #117
mfer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't the case for all trades people. It might be a bad area or a bad employer. I've know trades folks who are electricians, plumbers, carpenters, work in road construction, etc. They typically work reasonable hours, have medical, and are paid at or above the median income for where they live. They didn't rack up debt getting into this either. This is not a bad deal for many people.

There's a semi-retired craftsman I watch regularly on youtube - Essential Craftsman. Almost all long-term success stories in the trades which he tells directly or gets from his friends involve transitioning from a tradesman to an employer. You're selling your health and body as a tradesman. If you can make the transition to running a trades business, then you're selling your brainpower more than your body. Success st…

Came here to say this. Growing up in the Midwest I saw this all the time. The kids of plumbers that owned a plumbing business lived in a very nice part of town, the kids of plumbers still going to job sites lived in an OK part of town.

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

#178

Post by JumpCrisscross »

maxsilver wrote: post #158
yucky wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The original premise was that trades are where all the money is Nobody has ever said the "trades are where all the money is". This premise is flawed already. > My point is that we were previously told: the money is in college degrees, the money is in STEM, the money is in nursing. And people invested a lot of time and money in taking that advice and it went nowhere. It still is. It sounds like too many people have…

> Everyone learns the law of supply and demand before adulthood, or if they haven't then they shouldn't be going to college anyway. Yeah, the problem is that the "law of supply and demand" is a simple metaphor to help children gently begin learning economics, not how anything actually works. Almost no price any real person encounter anywhere in their daily life is actually determined in any meaningful way by "supply"…

> no price any real person encounter anywhere in their daily life is actually determined in any meaningful way by "supply" or "demand"

Case in point.

> how every hospital is short staffed and desperate for nurses (high demand), while we also constantly law nurses off or reduce hours (and nursing has consistently-fixed low salaries, despite the shortages)

How many paying patients are they turning away on account of this supposed shortage?

There isn't a national nurse shortage. Nurses are being overworked. And in some regions, there are shortages, though that's out of an inability to pay traveling nurse rates.

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

#179

Post by falcolas »

ghaff wrote: post #143
falcolas wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good point. I think it's even dead for the over 40 crowd, as they try and slide into a new career which they can work part time and make a living on. Given how questionable retirement as a reality is these days.

In general, reasonably lucrative part-time work for someone coming from a professional role is tricky. And even more so if you really want to have fairly fine-grained control around both weekly workload and longer vacations. Well-paying work that lets you just pick and choose something here and there and then take a month off if you feel like it are pretty uncommon.

You're 100% not wrong. I think in many cases through it's supplementing insufficient retirement funds, so even a low skill low wage part time job (making/selling art, garden fruits/vegetables, foods, etc) may be sufficient to provide enough runway for existing retirement funds.

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

#180

Post by 1970-01-01 »

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…

I think that's mostly accurate. Demand won't be high forever. A hybrid approach will develop. Software and tech in the day, welding and plumbing in the evening. Eventually, whatever the young employee values more will be prioritized for a career.
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