BREAKING NEWS – Help Wanted Everywhere!
October 20, 2016 The trade shortage is a global problem It’s not just here in the U.S. Employers around the world are finding it hard to recruit enough skilled trade workers – harder than any other field. The latest Talent Shortage Survey by ManpowerGroup that was just released sampled more than 42,000 employers in 43 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 a potential HVAC career for her 19-year-old son. She described […]
Think Small
January 19, 2016 Trade employers are mostly small businesses If you become a skilled trade worker the odds are great that you will end up working for a small company. The latest Census of Construction Industries shows that the average construction company has fewer than 10 employees. Almost two-thirds of them employ fewer than five […]
Labor Come Alive!
August 14, 2015 It’s a thrill to see the results of your work I spent more than three decades covering the skilled trades as a trade journalist. Now that I’m retired I look back with immense satisfaction at the friendships made and life lessons learned. Among the latter is a profound appreciation of the contributions […]
Welders Are Worth A Lot
April 8, 2015 Few trades suffer such great a shortage. A consistent theme of my blogs is that skilled trade workers are in short supply in a number of industries. Few trades have a shortage as desperate as that of welders. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were more than half a million […]
Driving In Style
March 26, 2015 By Todd Goldmeyer Trade professionals are highly mobile, meaning they don’t spend a lot of time sitting around in an office, twiddling their thumbs from boredom. Instead, workers in the trades are always on-the-go, heading from one job to the next. It’s a fantastic field to work in if you like to be […]
Have Wrench, Will Travel
Trade work is wherever you find it. A skilled trade career offers many rewards. One that may or may not appeal to you is the opportunity to live and work in a place other than where you are now living. Good news about trade work is that very few people in our society live […]