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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...

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...

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 […]

The skilled trades are about more than money.   I knew a plumber who spent time polishing with steel wool all the copper pipe joints he would braze or solder on a given job. This served no useful purpose performance-wise. The water inside would flow no more smoothly and most customers wouldn’t...

Service work especially demands a clean background.   Life is tough for people who end up in prison. It can be even tougher when they get out and have to fend for themselves when it comes to providing their own food and shelter. Job opportunities are very limited for those with a criminal record....

But that means opportunity for you!   For the fifth year in a row, the lack of skilled trade workers topped ManpowerGroup’s 2014 survey on the hardest jobs to fill in the U.S. Not only are plumbers, HVAC technicians and electricians in short supply, the situation is growing steadily worse because...

Student loan payments quash home ownership   Homeownership among young Americans has hit the lowest level on record, according to the Wall Street Journal. It’s probably not a coincidence that this coincides with burgeoning student debt. College graduates with student loans owe an average of $33,000,...

The answer is that there is no answer. Germany is a nation renowned for the high caliber of its trade workers and the goods they produce in construction and manufacturing. A big reason is a system for identifying mechanically adept individuals early on and tracking them into trade careers via apprenticeships....

Every generation freaks out its parents!   Back in the Roaring Twenties most older folks couldn’t understand their children’s fascination with a new style of music known as jazz – “the devil’s music,” as it was widely called. Those children grew up to be just as shocked when an even...