Blog

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....

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...

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...

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 […]