The Trade UP!

What you can do about the worsening skilled trades shortage

Filed under Uncategorized

In a final installment of our detailed discussion of the skilled trades shortage, we take a look at what you can do to lessen the impact of the coming skilled trades shortage.

1. Encourage young people to investigate trade schools and skilled trades careers as a more practical and probably more lucrative option to many college or university education tracks. Do you have friends with Arts degrees who ended up delivering mail or driving a cab for a living? Don’t you think prospective students will be happier in the long-term making $50 per hour doing something more valuable to society than (for example) remembering the names and dates of Napoleon’s battles?

2. Support initiatives for significant education reform. Tough Choices or Tough Times is a report supported by many in industry and education circles. It suggests some radical changes to education in the United States including encouraging students to drop out of or at least cut back on high school in order to pursue apprenticeships. Other suggestions include average teacher salaries of over $100,000/ year (to encourage the best people to pursue teaching careers) and universal childhood education beginning at 3 and 4 years old. While others only talk of overhauling America’s beleaguered education system this report lays out a clear map of how to do so. But it simply does not have any momentum and the only reason for that seems to be complacency. Year after year, other countries soundly outperform the US in education competitions but we do not seem all that concerned. We better be. Read more here: http://www.skillscommission.org

3. Encourage your workplace and other local businesses to increase trade school support, apprenticeships and other programs to improve on skilled trades training. Everyone benefits from this. Too many workplaces are relying on government training programs and incentives. But in the end, the government solutions are often self serving and do not serve the long term needs of industry or business.

4. Stop perpetuating negative stereotypes about skilled trades. As your mother told you, if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything. While many skilled trades now involve the use of automation that makes the work much simpler and cleaner, many people are still telling their kids things like “plumbing is dirty work.” This is unfortunate and unnecessary. Or if you’re going to say things like that make sure to tell your kids how much the plumber is making.

You may have a hard time with that last comment, though. If the coming skilled trades shortage is as bad as many say it will be, pay rates for skilled trades may be rising on a daily basis.