To me this is a validation of my parenting approach. My mantra for teens has been learn a trade, and then a profession if you want to.
A trade being any job you can do with your own tools and is universally useful to people. So carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer, just you and the person that needs the job done, and results in the satisfaction of some basic human need. Ideally you could arrive in a new town with only this skill and your tools, and begin to eke out an existence. I favor trades that are also useful to oneself, so the building trades are good because everyone needs shelter-may as well build your own or at least understand what you are buying. Doctor also works as a trade, because the need is so basic and universal.
A profession being anything else, basically, especially if it generally requires an employer (major capital investment) to be a useful activity. Interestingly, being a farmer falls into this category, since it requires land and equipment. Even if you own the land and equipment, you could lose it, and then your livelihood is out of your reach. So that’s a profession, by my narrow practical classification.
I figured with a trade and a profession, young adults are much better prepared to roll with the punches in the inevitable chaos they will confront, and be empowered to walk away from situations that are untenable. The power to walk away is highly underrated.
For myself, I have benefited greatly from my practical upbringing, and am a sophomore journeyman in many trades but my happy place is creating things. Electronics, a little mechanics, and software to breathe life into the soul of a new machine. Fortunately I have been hardcore unemployable by nature for decades, so I have developed the freedom to follow my own path, which is deeply gratifying. But without a strong trades type background this would not have really been possible.
A friend is dropping out of IT to pursue welding - but knows the money just isn’t there. She’s starting a 5:30am 10 hour shift at a manufacturer to be able to move onto welding and CNC. She’s autistic so can struggle sometimes but is also one of the smartest people I know and does physics puzzles for fun and builds shit all the time.
Skilled trade jobs value paying your dues. Its more about that than aptitude it seems to me.
Sorry high schoolers, $70k a year is not happening - this kid is privileged as fuck.
There's not much I dislike more than well off white collar workers telling kids to skip school and go into the trades. Don't buy it. If at all possible get a degree, sit at a desk, and earn a living wage. This is your first priority.
That 68k/yr wage only sounds good if you're still thinking in circa year 2000 dollars. Nobody is making the mortgage on a house on 68k/year, and they're not starting a happy family if they have to do 20+hrs/week overtime in order to turn 25/hr into 68k/year. I remember earning nearly exactly that wage back in the early 2000s, and barely making ends meet in a cheap rental, so it's certainly not a great wage today.
The opportunity for trades-based small business creation in America would feel a lot more tangible... absent the carried interest tax loophole.
Part of the small business trades success narrative is built upon trust, trust that in youth, doing good work will create a reputation within your community that will be remembered, and form the foundation for a brand (your name) that can attract the next generation of youth to be developed, trained, etc.
If successful small businesses only exist to get acquired, so that both workers and customers suffer, that foundation of trust will struggle to persist.
Welding isn't a job that you grow old in. It's physically taxing and exposes you to poisonous fumes and low levels of radiation from thoriated filaments. That's part of why kids are getting job offers, there needs to be a steady supply of meat.
I never went to college (high school dropout with a GED). My "formal" schooling was a 2-year, intensive EET (Technician) course, at a trade school.
It had both good and bad traits.
It was very structured and rigorous. When you graduated, you were ready to go directly into full-time work at almost any organization (the NSA and CIA used to recruit from our school).
It stressed practicum, over theory, though, so you came out more as a "doer," than a "thinker." All of my theoretical stuff, I learned on my own, after getting my first job. I did OK with that, as I was fairly quickly promoted into engineering (and was introduced to "exempt" pay).
Can’t really read the article so can’t confirm this. There’s a this idea that like a liberal focus on college has made the trades so unpopular no one is going into the trades, but doesn’t at least half the country live in a place / have parents that value the trades?
I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools.
Which means that maybe somewhat unintuitively, there are no separate paths — college for good students, trade school and military for I dunno, “non-academic/street smarts or whatever you wan to call it. — trade schools, the military and colleges are actually all competing for the same students.
The second theory is tied to the first one, but for all the marketing on how great these jobs are, there are structural / practical problems with them. From how they pay, to lack of job security to the havoc they can wreak on your body.
hmm... the U.S. economy might stand to benefit from adapting a school system more akin to the German model?
Specifically, offering a track similar to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_school
I wonder how long it will be until AI is making all the CAD/CNC models with just a check by humans. Same with the laser cutter they mentioned, water jet cutter, etc. It can't be that hard to have a model trained to take a technical drawing and generate the CAD model.
I think if I lose my current job (on a PIP), that I should be a CAD designer (entry level around $75k). But then I'm concerned that I'll be out of a job in a couple years.
For what it's worth, /r/welding seems to think this claim is complete bunk:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Welding/comments/1khd9aj/this_is_co...
How common it is to have shop classes in schools in USA?
For me in Poland, my high-school education was at liceum, i.e focus on academic subjects.
There are vocational schools, but they're known to be awful quality and you don't go there if you want to earn trade, but if you're an awful student. And if you aren't awful student, then you'll most likely end up as one - as your peers will most likely be :(
There are also "technikum" which is a mix of these two, but it's not for trade per se, and statistically chances you'll pass your end of school exams are smaller.
I mentored two FIRST robotics teams.
One was at a well-funded school with a big honors program. All of the students were smart and engaged and clever and ambitious. They designed an extremely clever, complicated robot that looked really cool on paper and was completely impractical to actually build and they did poorly overall, barely getting an extremely-stripped-down version of the design up and running, losing every match with usually no points scored.
The other was at a poorly funded school with no honors classes. The students were just as intelligent and just as hard working, but instead of AP math and physics they were taking auto shop and wood shop. And they knew how to quickly design, build, and test simple, reliable solutions that got the job done. They fared much better in competition.
Me personally, I did mechanical work for a decade before getting a CS degree and a desk job. And I'm really glad I did. Welding and machinery were a heck of a lot more fun than debugging distributed software systems, and I'm glad I spent my 20s doing the former instead of the latter.
There was a time when high-school shop and home ec was normal.
In something like a century now of obsession with higher ed, America seems to have forgotten about the concept of trade schools. Now companies hitting on the idea of recruiting out of shop class makes the a WSJ headline in 2025. LOL!
Works where archive.ph is blocked:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/the-high...
Text-only:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1EjI7E
The problem with skilled trades is they put you inside a very limited skill box. You're stuck monetizing that trade for decades, with very little business opportunities outside that box. Swings in the economy and your health will not neatly follow this model of one-and-done.
Non-paywalled version here: https://archive.is/mhFn0
You need 200k/yr to be comfortable in Alabama. These headlines are for older generations who think that is too much money for a young person. Meanwhile, they’d never be able to afford the homes they now live in.
There is a classic capitalist ploy, documented in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, where business owners vastly over-advertise the abundance and remuneration offered by a certain area of work. Then many hopeful people uproot themselves to go into that field, so supply and demand pushes down wages, benefitting the owners.
In America 2025, there is no better path to a high income and quality of life than learning a trade, then learning how to manage other tradespeople and then owning a company for such a trade.
In the trades, if you are slightly smarter than average, have a good work ethic and an inkling of entrepreneurial drive, you will be very successful.
I love this. This is what we need more of. My only concern is who will challenge their thinking? Who will teach them critical thinking skills? Who will give them a broader more holistic understanding of the world if not at a university?
I fear we will get ( because we need them ) many thousands more skilled workers in the trades to build more again but they’ll also be too easily bamboozled by charlatans like Trump and vote in policies that will screw us all
good for them
the world is changing.
I was raised to believe that going to college was the only right path. But later, a friend of mine dropped out and started training as a machinist—and somehow, he ended up living much more freely than most of us. He’s not what you'd call especially “smart,” but he has this intuitive sense for metal, welding, and machines.
Every day he works in the shop, sweating through long shifts, but somehow still has the energy at night to tell us stories—about the machine he fixed, or how he spotted a tiny issue just by the sound it made.
That feeling of solving something and seeing the result immediately. I’ve never felt that in a year of sitting at a desk.
Sometimes I wonder if being truly respectable isn’t about how much you earn, but whether you feel proud of what you do.
https://archive.ph/sWpS1