A Lifetime Burden
July 12, 2016 Student debt can stay with you forever It was chilling to read a recent Wall Street Journal article detailing what can only be called a crisis with student debt, most of which is owed by college graduates or, worse, college dropouts. The
My Commencement Speech
Congratulations on your choice of a trade career! This month the news media has been filled with stories of dignitaries addressing graduates at commencement ceremonies of various colleges. In these speeches the VIPs typically congratulate the grads and encourage them to go out and do
Supply Versus Demand
June 6, 2016 The trades offer opportunity galore! This article is going to be short and sweet. I’ve written before in this space about the shortage of skilled trade workers in our country. When supply is low, job opportunities and pay scales go up. No
Why Women Should Consider The Trades
May 24, 2016 Brute force is not required! Misconceptions abound about the trades and the people who work in them. Many of these misconceptions date back to a bygone era when there might have been more truth to them. One of these misconceptions is that
Why Are So Few Women In The Trades?
May 9, 2016 Old habits die hard! The knee-jerk answer some people might give to that question is because the skilled trades are not very welcoming to women. That may have been true in the past but for the most part not anymore. Social attitudes
Automation Doesn’t Threaten The Trades
April 26, 2016 Robot plumbers are a long, long way off Can trade workers be replaced by machines? That would seem to be the implication by a computer scientist at Rice University, who predicts that by 2045 machines will be capable of doing almost any
Defending The Trades
April 12, 2016 Take pride in what you aspire to be In my last article I described a conversation I once had with an affluent suburban mother whose son was interested in an HVAC career. She knew nothing about the field and contacted me when
Setting Mom Straight
March 22, 2016 Tell your parents what’s great about the skilled trades I’ll never forget a conversation I had some years ago when I served as editor of Plumbing & Mechanical magazine. I spent almost an hour on the phone with a mom talking about
Color Yourself Green
March 7, 2016 The trades are in the forefront of the ecology movement To their credit, young people today are more environmentally conscious than just about any generation in history. They know that the future well-being of our society depends on conserving energy and water