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Construction Trades - A Good Career Choice

ContraCostaTimes.com | 11/23/2005 | Traditional trades face declining interest even as business booms

I just saw this article this morning and quite honestly it's one of thousands. What continues to bother me is that parents and educators are still ignoring the skiled trades as a viable career option.

When I was in school I was told that I'd never make anything of myself if I didn't go to college - luckily I followed my own guiding light and stuck with the electrical trade. Looking back I'm glad I did because of both the personal satisfaction I get from building things as well as the fantastic compensation that comes from being highly skilled in all elements of construction.

I think it is sad that more people don't open their eyes and realize that a journeyman trades person is just as skilled and just as valuable as a CPA, lawyer or other professional - here's what the difference is:

A skilled tradesperson applies their craft on-site and is therefore immune to most outsourcing. Have you been reading about what is happening in IT? A team of "Construction Workers" laid a fiber optic cable across the ocean and now we can get the same IT services performed for 10% or less in another country.

Thanks to those construction workers we can now ship anything electronic around the world instantly. Even small businesses can outsource using services such as eLance. I posted a project for computer programming and got over 40 bids for a $2,000 job. The bids started at $1 per hour! Spend some time looking around and you will see offshore CPA services, engineering, design, etc.

As a small business I've used these services often to keep costs down and I've got to say that the quality is excellent - on the other hand when my HVAC unit went out a couple of winters ago I still had to pay $150 per hour for a HVAC service call and the guy couldn't show up until 7PM because he was too busy.

If you are in the trades you understand this intimately - if you are one of the parents or educators who associates construction with digging a ditch you should re-think your position. Imagine the future when many of the "white collar jobs" you think you are preparing people for either get replaced by a computer and database or shipped across the ocean to lower-income areas. Remember that there are still billions of people around the world who can live on a couple of US Dollars per day - and many of them can be trained to do those programming, design, analysis and engineering jobs.

Whether you agree with this or not it is a reality and is not likely to change.

If you keep hanging on to the past and telling people they will fail if they go into the skilled-trades or other service industries you are the ones actually creating the failure of a generation.

Posted by David Brown on November 25, 2005 10:53 AM|Permalink

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