You Need Relevant Skills
September 13, 2016 A big bank funds a program to do that The media keeps reporting that the U.S. unemployment rate keeps dropping. The latest official data shows that it has dropped below 5% of the eligible workforce, a level that historically has come close to defining full employment, since some people are voluntarily unemployed. […]
Seeing Is Believing
Open your doors to interested people Virtually every trade contractor I know tells me that finding qualified help is one of their biggest problems, especially technicians who are either experienced or trainable. They put help-wanted ads in all the right places, attend career day events, offer recruitment bonuses, even put recruitment messages on their service […]
Good Jobs Are Hard To Find
The trades offer plenty of them. Here’s a recent story that grabbed my attention. It describes a scene in Queens, New York, where hundreds of people camped out overnight to receive applications to join the Plumbers Local 1 apprenticeship program. The union made it known that they would hand out a maximum of 1,000 applications, […]
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 article (subscription required) said that 43% of some 22 million […]
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 some good for society. It’s unfortunate that we never hear […]
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 matter where you live in this country or which skilled […]
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 the trades involve a lot of heavy lifting, so brute […]
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 have evolved over the years and even where they haven’t, […]
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 job a human can. He cites the rate of progress […]
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 I was a trade magazine editor who had written about […]