Skilled Trades or "Lack Of"

'Round here years ago they killed all of the trade classes in high schools & left it to Jr. colleges & Comm. Colleges to provide - guess what - they weren't prepared & took years to ramp-up, and now are overcrowded & can't serve the young 'uns who won't continue their studies for whatever reasons....

You gotta hit 'em early to get them exposed & possibly interested

Your 100 percent correct. I can remember learning to solder using a copper iron heated in a gas oven in a 6th grade general shop glass. Which everyone in the school had to take.

I have one grandson who has taken up the profession and I have been delighted to be able to teach him over the years. My son also is a highly skilled welder. But we're all a dying bread sorry to say.

The only thing each of us can do is to speak-up at the school broad meetings and make sure our tax dollars are spent the way we want them to be.

Back when I was in high school, I was able to take both mechanical and architectural drafting courses, metal shop class and wood working class. The school also had a good automotive shop class. Being a hands on guy, I used to love these courses.

Unfortunately, courses like this are disappearing in high schools.

I think a good way to possibly fill the gap, would be for companies like yours, and others, to have programs that kids could enter after high school, as an alternative to college. If they needed a few courses at a local tech school to get up to speed, either the parents could pay for it, or the company could pay for it, and get reimbursed after the kid is certified and goes to work for the company. There must be some way that it wouldn't cost the parents or the company too much money, and everybody wins.

After years of kids hearing nothing but, " get a degree or you'll never amount to anything", it would be nice to have programs available for them to learn the trades.

I tried college and quit in my first year. They had me taking English classes, (which I had done well in, in high school), and a bunch of other required crap that I wasn't interested in. I was ready to learn something tangible, that could be applied to the real world.

I ended up in the Navy. They put me through machinists school, and off to work I went, on a ship, it was fun.

I still recommend the military to young kids out of school, that don't know what to do. As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the best springboards into the trades that there is.

Every trade that's needed on the outside, is needed in the military, and they will train you. Join when they're 18, and by 22 they're out and ready to hit the ground running, unlike a lot of their college educated counterparts.

Where did all the skilled workers you need go? Most were laid off years ago and have since transitioned into survival jobs at Starbucks. Their skills lost forever somewhere at the bottom of a paper coffee cup.

The local technical schools have also been transitioning into service-economy job training rather than industrial. Where once they taught CAD, instrumentation and electronics you'll find now massage therapy, hotel management and dental hygiene.

Sorry mate, but "corporate America" by and large doesn't care one bit about keeping things going here. It's not about what will happen in 7 years - it's about what costs they can trim today. Sadly, in some cases it's not even dimwitted short-sightedness. I've worked for executives who actively sabotaged US operations in order to better justify moving production overseas. Some even colluded with their offshore contacts, lining their pockets twice over.

I don't know fixitorelse. Why not hire the willing and train 'em?

Seems to me I'd have never gotten any jobs if I had been always required to already known everything about it.

Far as I'm concerned willingness to work and learn counts for a good deal.

Who do you get to train the guy who's supposed to learn on the job? There are jobs that need trained personnel from the start. I suppose one could send them to school to learn the trade, but someone like a machinist takes years to become truly competent.

The local machine shop that I use is run by a machinist who had his training interrupted when the corporation that employed him cut back on the training program. He'd still learned a lot and now owns his own shop. Interestingly enough, he hired the master machinist that formerly trained him. He will also acknowledge that he is still learning from his mentor.

I've talked with him at length; he says the same, that it's harder and harder to find properly trained machinists. The craft is being lost. He also notes that with the NC machines, the nuances have been lost. Where it used to be that one used the knowledge gained from manual working a part in programming an NC machine, now there are no longer machinists with that knowledge of the manual method. These days he hires operators not machinists. An operator puts raw stock in, pushes the start button, sweeps the floor, then removes the finished parts. A machinist is so much more.

Same problem here in UK years ago apprenticeships where stopped no investment in the trades.

Existing trades persons laid off got work in other industries, now experienced work force is needed no skills anywhere, Just over qualified people with pointless degrees in history, languages, zoo-ology music, French German, Spanish, literature, studying how cows eat, research into the best type of milk. degrees in astronomy,

you can get Degrees in the silliest of things here, but they have no value in the real world

and degrees in mechanical engineering NO WAY to hard

I manage a small ship repair yard and have found it near impossible to find any personnel with experience applicable to the trade. Of course in my near 40 years in this industry it has declined to almost non-existence in the US and thus the trades have not been passed on. But even with that considered, (good) welders are few and far between; ship fitters are assemblers and machinists are machine operators.

I thought that with the economic situation leading to layoffs there would be an abundance of willing and able workers to hire, but alas, what I've found is that with the exception of entire companies being shut down, most are laying off their least capable and productive workers and thus flooding the available ranks with those less desirable.

Adding to the problem is the absence of a discernible work ethic in most people of more recent generations. That could be attributable to our raising them, bit that's a whole different topic.

It's too late. You may have to send your new hires off to language school as soon as you find them.

Nobody here does that any more.

In my opinion, there must be an incentive to dedicate oneself to what has been portrayed (particularly in the media) as an endeavor of lesser redeeming social value. Many are unaware of the ongoing investment in further education for an auto mechanic as an example. To many, this person is a "grease monkey". So then, the incentive is money and people are outraged when they get the bill.

As for the young people coming back into the workforce from the military, with usable training, there should be an internet "bulletin board" so that they can connect with organizations that can use them. At least in the U.S.

The incentive for any work is money. You make a good point though.

I'm a painting contractor. I can also lay tile, frame a house, work on cars, small engines, electrical, plumbing,etc. and have the tools for all of that stuff.

Part of the reason that I learned about all of these other things, besides being interested in how it's done, was to save money by doing it myself, also to have some other skills to fall back on to make money, if needed.

"lesser redeeming social value."

This is where it gets weird, and back to your point. I've been painting for 27 years, of all types. And yet, I still will finish a paint job, where my bid was in line with others, for a homeowner, that makes $300,000 a year, and they will be shocked and upset that I was able to make $400 in less than a day. As if, because I paint, I should never be able to make that kind of money. If I'm making more than $15 an hour, they think they're getting ripped.

This isn't the norm, but it happens often enough. Not surprisingly, it's usually lawyers.

At some point, all of these things, that no one feels like doing, or learning how to do, will be worth big bucks, because they all still have to be done, and very few people will know how.

A while back I went to a vocational school to see if I could teach there. The first question was "Do you have a teacher's degree?" duh, no, I've been in the trades for the last thirty or so years, didn't fit in the years that it would take to get that. To go to college you need money and a desire for more school, just after twelve years of school. Yippee.

I was tired of school, went into the trades, learned them all, and would love to pass it on. Not allowing qualified, experienced people to teach is counter-productive. If some special class in 'teacher skills' is necessary, it could be taken in night school while the new teacher is still probationary.

Classes could have 'teacher's aides' who know the trades, and 'teachers' who have the paperwork necessary to satisfy the bureaucrats.

I enjoy teaching, have been told I'm good at it. When a person knows what he's talking about, it's easier to teach. If a student asks a question not in the text book, the skilled worker will have the answer. The BS-MS-PHD will have to look it up, and his credibility with the students goes out the window.

Similar experience to yours some years back. Funny thing thought, I can teach your kid to fly and do not have to have a degree. Just need to pass the FAA exam. Most airline pilots flying today have no degree! Just someone like me taught them to fly. Whats the difference between the two. None, if a skilled trades person such as a master elcterican or class A Millwright can and is willing to teach, who better to do so. Some profrssor is not going to know the ends and outs of making or doing it right. Thats the way it was always done in the old days of apprenticeships.