I’ve spent the last six posts on this blog explaining why trades are a good career choice for young people today. But now I’m going to take a step back and look at it from the other side. Trades are a good fit for many people, but not everyone.

As a tradesman, you will have to weigh the balance between excitement and danger. You could be tiling roofs six stories in the air, repairing downed power lines in floods, or running band saws, table saws, circular saws, or chainsaws that all can severely injure or kill you. You will likely be on the job, outside, in freezing cold and burning sun, at all hours of the day or night, up to your elbows in mortar and soot. You will come home after a long day’s work smelling like fish guts and motor oil.

You will not have a prestigious Yale degree that will take you anywhere you want. There will be some people that look down on you as a moonshine-drinking, two-toothed, uneducated, overweight redneck who lives in a trailer in the woods, listens exclusively to Jason Aldean, and drives an F-350 with a Trump bumper sticker. Not all, but some.

 

Now let’s look at this again from the office job perspective.

As a businessman, you will have to weigh the balance between boredom and upward mobility. You could be filling out TPS reports six stories in the air, sending out billing invoices from home during a flood, or running copiers, printers, staplers, and scanners that all can severely papercut you. You will likely be on the job, inside, sitting in a chair at 72°F, from exactly 9 to 5, up to your elbows in Oxford cloth. You will come home after a long day’s work smelling like Lysol and the fresh coat of paint in the break room.

You will have a prestigious MBA from Yale that can take you anywhere you want: cubicle 314P at the insurance company across the street, cubicle 272E at the software company around the block, or cubicle 602M at the financial services corporation on the corner. There will be some people that look down on you as a soy latte-drinking, overly educated, underweight wuss who lives in an upper-middle class townhouse, listens exclusively to Owl City, and drives a Prius with a Bernie bumper sticker. Not all, but some.

The moral of the story? There are going to be things about any job that stink, and people will look down on you no matter what you do. Find a job that you can enjoy going to every day. For a lot of people that can handle the work, I believe that means working with your hands and not just your head. Not everyone is made to be a physicist, but not everyone is made to be a mechanic either. We need both, and I hope that this blog helped you to see that.

 

When I was in high school and several of my friends were going to our technical school for their senior year (Vo-Tech), their reasoning varied a lot. Some of them had wanted to become mechanics or welders for years and were eager to get a jumpstart. Some wanted to go on to a four-year school and either have a hands-on foundation for their degree or have a secondary career path. And some, I imagine, wanted to go to Vo-Tech because they thought it would be “easier” than another year of algebra and chemistry. This is the mentality that I had when I took my sophomore welding class, as described in my earlier post, “Myth #1: Tradesmen Don’t Need to be Smart”.

Those guys, as well as myself, were in for a surprise. They were looking for a career where at 5:00, they could clock out for the day, go home, and sit down—a luxury that doctors and lawyers don’t exactly get. However, tradesmen don’t always have that luxury either. Many of them do shift work at all hours of the night or are on call to keep critical power supplies running. In most trades, employees are required to keep up licenses and certifications to guarantee safe, quality workmanship. For example, as a farmer, in order to buy pesticides I must be a certified pesticide applicator, which I am. I earned this certification by taking a very long exam that made sure I was intimately familiar with safe handling procedures, off-site environmental impacts, and proper application techniques. HVAC technicians must obtain a special license if they are to handle refrigerants like Freon. Plumbers who want to work independently need to be certified as master plumbers by the National Inspection Testing and Certification Corporation after six years of work.

As I’ve said previously, blue-collar work is not any easier than white-collar, it simply uses a different set of skills. I was in for a shock when I realized that my welding class wasn’t just stoners who had no aspirations. To be sure, there were some there who just wanted to fool around in the shop, but there were plenty of those kids in AP classes, too. The size of your brain doesn’t determine how successful you can be (ahem, Mike Bloomberg), your determination and willingness to grind it out do. Whether you aspire to be a foundry worker or a particle physicist, you only will succeed if you put in a whole lot of work to do the job right.

In this unsettling documentary, prominent YouTuber C. G. P. Grey predicts that most jobs are destined to be replaced by robots and computers. Humans, he argues, have built bulldozers and forklifts and chainsaws to replace or greatly improve upon manual labor. His conclusion is that the day is coming when AI and robotics similarly replace skilled labor and mental work. His “march of the monitors” is slated to bring mass unemployment.

Grey paints a bleak picture of the future—a picture that I find overly pessimistic and unlikely. While automation will replace some jobs, I believe that a very large number will still be left to human tradesmen. The key here lies at the heart of the term “skilled labor”: Workers are willing and able to learn new skills and adapt to changing technology. A robot can only be built to do a certain number of specific, closely related tasks, but one master carpenter has to be familiar with a countless array of skills. This is, ironically, why robots have taken over so many assembly line jobs in factories: a robot and a laborer could install the same one part, but the robot was cheaper. The employees that stayed were the ones that performed complicated jobs, with multiple parts that one machine couldn’t cover all the bases of.

What is more, humans have a unique advantage over machines in being able to ask questions—a skill that is more important than it may sound. Tell a luthier to saw his work bench in half and he will think you’re a lunatic. Tell a CNC router to cut itself in half and it will promptly do so, no questions asked. (I toured a local snowboard producer’s shop some time ago, and this is exactly what they told me.) This difference allows human tradesmen to look for ways to improve, making tastier salami or more efficient heating systems. A computer will do exactly, precisely what you tell it, the same way every time, either until the end of time or until a bug garbles it. Which of these is more likely to make the economy grow?

Grey is correct that automation is going to change how trades are done; he is wrong in assuming that that way will be by sending all the workers to soup kitchens. But that’s okay, he’s allowed to be wrong. If only he was as smart as a tradesman…

This isn’t so much a myth as a stereotype, but it certainly is a far-reaching one. Although the interpretation of the results is controversial, research indicates that generally, men tend to be more interested in working with objects while women are more interested in people. This is theorized to explain why you see more male welders and female psychologists. This chart shows the percentages of men and women in given occupations, and many types of trades are found at the male-dominated lower end. At the very bottom are drillers, boilermakers, and roofers, each of which is one percent female or less.

Some people, therefore, have extrapolated this data to conclude that women are disinterested in technical jobs. On the contrary, I believe that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy; few women enter these careers because they are not advertised to them. When they do, however, they can become just as capable of workers as the men they work alongside. Only a few girls from my high school went to a technical school, but the ones that did are now very successful tradeswomen. There is a huge effort to engage more women as aerospace engineers and geologists. Why not put that same effort into opening doors for them to become machinists?

Another strong argument for getting women into trades is that they provide opportunities for economic growth. Whether you believe the “gender pay gap” is caused by individual career choices or sexist management, the simple fact is that as a whole, American women earn less than American men. Looking back at the chart from earlier, many of the female-dominated jobs at the top, like kindergarten teachers and librarians, are relatively low-paying. This is not to say that those are unimportant jobs—far from it—but looking elsewhere for work may lead to greater opportunities for financial stability for women.

During the Second World War, countless women took up factory work to fill the vacancies left by men who went overseas to defend our nation. Rosie the Riveter, with her tied-back hair and brawny forearms, became an icon of hardworking women. Yet I find it strange that although we have a Society of Women Engineers chapter here at Penn State, up the road at Penn College there is no Society of Women in Excavation. I wonder what Rosie the Riveter would say today about the dearth of women in her line of work?

 

Smells.

Acrid smells.

Smells of gasoline and welding flux.

Smells that cling to your hair and clothes, day and night, until one day, you just stop noticing them.

This is the typical idea a lot of people hold about what it is like to work in a garage or a machine shop. The air saturated with fumes and grime, clanking machines bellowing a constant dissonance, and saws and wires that are just waiting for an opportunity to severely injure their next hapless victim. Once again though, this picture is little more than a stereotype. I don’t mean to imply that trades are as comfortable as an air-conditioned office job—far from it. Blue-collar workers spend their days in front of blast furnaces, repairing freezers from the inside, and painting bridges hundreds of feet above the water. This begs the question, “Why would anyone want to take that kind of a risk?”

The answer, I believe, is that these workers are passionate about what they do. They believe in hard work to accomplish something, and they can see on their greasy hands that they have done so. They are willing to take those risks for the satisfaction of a job well done. Sometimes that comes with the lesson of a smashed thumb or singed eyebrows. Often, the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong first. But they keep doing it because they want to become masters.

I learned to weld safely by nearly blowing myself up.

I learned to mix concrete by casting a sculpture with far too much sand and water.

I learned to stack firewood by having it all collapse.

Indeed, I was miserable when I started trying these things because I was, admittedly, pretty awful at them. But with time and a lot more mistakes, I came to appreciate them because I worked hard and succeeded. That is why tradesmen appreciate their “miserable” jobs so much: they get to work hard in a job they have a passion for and produce successful results.

One more thing to mention here, of course, is safe working conditions. Whether you believe OSHA is overreaching or too lax, the safety of trade jobs has been on a continuous incline for many years. Lead is gone from paint and solder, pesticides are strictly reviewed for health hazards, and radial arm saws are barely sold anymore. There are certainly still many dangerous things that the trades entail, but it is undeniable that safer workers are happier workers.

I will end with the famous motto of Larry the Cable Guy: “Git ‘er done!” Working in these industries is grimy, dusty, and loud. But the passion of hard work makes up for it to make these dedicated men and women proud of what they do.

You probably have seen charts like this one that send a fairly simple message: More education means more money in the long run. If you want to think and grow rich, you’ll need to stay in school long enough for a J.D., M.B.A., M.D., or any other string of extra letters after your name. Insert alphabet soup here.

The problem, however, is that this chart only tells half the story. This goes back to the last post about how your electrician may not know differential calculus, but he must be intimately familiar with properly wiring complicated circuits together or his work may, quite literally, go up in smoke. Trades rely on skills that cannot be learned from a textbook. The training to become a master plumber and a Master of Arts take about the same length of time, but the plumber spends most of that time on the job site instead of in a classroom. For this reason, he is lumped together in the chart with McDonald’s fry cooks and Walmart cashiers, who vastly outnumber him and strongly skew the statistics.

Customers pay tradesmen based on their skill, not their theoretical knowledge. Furthermore, the longer a tradesman works, the more opportunities he will have to learn more specialized skills that pay even higher. Underwater welding, medical gas pipes, computerized precision machining, and solar panel installation are just a few of the rapidly progressing, in-demand skills for aspiring tradesmen. For this reason, many tradesmen at the top of their profession can earn six-figure salaries.

Meanwhile, let’s look at the other side of the coin and see what our erroneous graph predicts for the erudite holders of fancy degrees. For many of them, the dream job is a prestigious academic post—but often, these jobs simply aren’t there because the few jobs are already filled. This isn’t just the case in the arts and humanities—think about how many astronomers you meet. (Here’s a hint: They’re outnumbered by astrologers ten to one.) 73 percent of college faculty jobs hiring today are non-tenure track. For others, the years of school pile up student loan debt they may never be able to repay. There may be the potential to earn a little more as a Distinguished Professor of Archaeology at Yale than as a crane operator, but which is a more realistic goal for most of the population?

Trades certainly pay enough to live a comfortable life, to raise a family, and to save for retirement. They may not make many billionaires, but neither do the vast, vast majority of MBAs.

This is probably the biggest misconception that drives people away from technical careers. I have been dissuaded by guidance counselors, teachers, and relatives from pursuing a trade on the grounds that “you won’t be challenged, and you’ll get bored”. At the time, I believed many of them. I believed that to use my talents, I would have to understand five-dimensional Kaluza-Klein theory, Wittgensteinian analytic philosophy, and oxidation of Grignard reagents. I believed bricklaying and diesel mechanics to be the territory of stoners and slackers.

Then, in 2017, I took a welding and masonry class (primarily to impress my dad, a maintenance man). In the first week, I realized just how much I had to learn: shield gases, eye protection ratings, sand-to-cement ratios, screeding techniques… These were all things that the “slackers” in my class were very familiar with, while I was burning holes in my khakis with my pathetic welds.

The same thing happened two years later with my small engines class. I knew the physics of why they worked, but that didn’t help me when I spent four months fixing a water pump. I really prided myself on passing AP Biology when I fumbled my way through my agriculture production final, demonstrating how to give a cow an embolism by injecting medicine the wrong way into a stuffed toy. Meanwhile, the other guys in that class were rebuilding four-wheelers and restoring antique tractors. I learned a great deal about mechanical work in those classes, but what was more important was that I learned that the rednecks in my class knew at least as much as I did. In fact, I would say that they likely knew more because they were able to apply it to real-world problems, which I will spend at least four years in college to learn to do with my major.

A college degree does not substitute for a brain, and neither do greasy hands. Tradesmen must have a great deal of practical knowledge to do their jobs correctly. Otherwise, they will produce wobbly tables and contaminated pork chops. Besides, many tradesmen still enjoy exercising their minds in their free time. I know a mechanic who taught himself Spanish at 55, a carpenter who composes classical flute music, and a trucker who has written his own fantasy novella. Trades, therefore, are not just for the “C” students who struggle to find the cosine of an angle or balance a chemical equation. They should be seen as a viable alternative for anyone who is looking for a practical career.

Fig 1. Hess, Randy. A cap, worn during Elizabethtown College’s 2014 commencement, that no doubt expresses a parent’s hope.

Today, America is more educated than ever before—and the amount of debt that its college graduates are saddled with is staggering. According to Forbes, the total student loan debt of America is in excess of $1.5 trillion, and more than one in ten graduates with loans has defaulted on them. We have built up a tremendous academic culture that prizes erudition: the likes of Noam Chomsky, Frank Lloyd Wright, Toni Morrison, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson—certainly, masters of their fields. But while countless students attempt to follow their paths and make radical changes, the roads they walk to class are full of potholes. Their water still flows through 6 million miles of lead pipes, the computers they write on are built overseas, and the ceiling fans in their offices have frayed wiring.

The solution to this problem is not to encourage more high school students to enter the bachelor’s-internship-office job pipeline. Instead, I believe that we need to drive education in the other direction and begin promoting the trades just as much as white-collar careers.

The young generation is not unemployed because they were handed a hopeless economy; they are unemployed because they are looking for jobs in the wrong places. Mike Rowe, a prominent advocate of the trades, has stated that the misconceptions surrounding trades—low pay, unintelligent workers, miserable conditions­—are turning away desperately needed potential employees. Instead, sadly, they opt to squabble over the few prestigious positions in business and academia. Those who fail will spend forty years working for companies they don’t care about, with degrees they will never pay off—and I think we can all agree this is far more miserable than smelling like diesel fuel every day.

Fig 2. Palmer, Alfred. “Big Pete” Ramagos, rigger at work on dam.

In this blog, I’ll examine several of these misconceptions surrounding the trades and vocational education. My mission is not to denigrate higher education, but to present a viable alternative option that rarely receives the credit that it is due. In fact, this option is one that I plan to pursue after I graduate from Penn State: I hope to go on to a trade school to learn a skill and work for several years before returning for graduate school. Our philosophers and astrophysicists certainly have produced great work, but they cannot repair America’s infrastructure alone. For that, we need the carpenters, bricklayers, and machinists that we so often make a footnote next to the architects and engineers.

Fig 3. Ebbets, Charles. Lunch Atop a Skyscraper.