HVAC at 23

Must everyone go to college after high school? It's becoming more and more clear that the answer is "No." You probably already know about famous examples of success without a degree, like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.

A young 23-year-old woman went into HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) instead of college and she sounds pretty happy about it. It's far from an office job. She's a service technician and her work is different every day. 

Trade school lasted only nine months at a cost of only $15,000--so much easier than paying tens of thousands of dollars yearly at a university. She recommends networking as a way to "get a foot in the door" toward practical experience.

This 18-year-old is a pipe fitter apprentice. He believes he's on track to make six figures in about 5 years. 

It may be best for young people to defy the prestige of college or university. There's opportunity in the trades. Celebrity Mike Rowe has been beating this drum for years.

from MSN

Regretted majors

Now that they have their degrees, are this year's college graduates happy that they spent so much effort and money on them? The answer is mixed. Many think they majored in the wrong subjects, and many more are anxious about finding work.

Almost half (46.3%) of those in political science areas wish they had chosen differently. Right behind them in second place (39.2%) on the most-regretted list is a major in "communication, media studies, or public relations."

Finding a job is as stressful as it's ever been, with more competition and fewer entry-level opportunities (AI may be responsible for this). Grads are submitting more applications and receiving fewer offers than just a year ago. 

Nursing leads the way in nearly every positive metric, including highest median pay ($70k). About a third of nursing grads have their job secured before graduation.

Job tips for students still in college: 

"Working during college more than doubles grads' odds of landing a job."
"Internships and apprenticeships are some of the clearest on-ramps into the workforce."

from Zip Recruiter

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Gen Z work

Social media is compelling, sometimes addicting. Among the youngest generation to reach adulthood today, it's been much more influential than it's been for older generations. Negative results have been noted.

A few people have leveraged social media (photo) for big incomes. Gen Z'ers do watch a lot of it and some have done what yesterday's post talks about: they dove into social media and used it to monetize their own lives. 

In fact, a few of them make a whole lot of money doing it. They're open about the money and their audience is impressed: "Watching influencers has changed my perception of what a good job is!"

As one 23-year-old put it, "Influencers are so open and honest about making four times as much as their old nine-to-fives, and having such flexible lifestyles, has opened my generation's eyes into what's possible. It makes you feel completely disillusioned, and it's made Gen Z completely nihilistic about working."

Add the higher cost of housing and issues of affordability to their situation, and working a regular job doesn't look so good.

What could go wrong?

from "Why Gen Z Hates Work"

Path to Pro

Trade jobs will always be in demand, and right now in this country the demand is higher than the supply. Lots of those jobs are going unfilled.

Home Depot wants to help. Their "Path to Pro Skills Program" trains individuals for careers in the skilled trades . . for free. 

Training is self-paced. You just go here and sign up online. 

After training is completed, you have exclusive access to their job network consisting of their customers who want to hire. Pass this tip along to someone who's looking for opportunity.

from Home Depot  

Motivated dad

Bad news? We see plenty of it. It's encouraging to see a good report occasionally. 

Here's a story of disciplined self-sacrifice on the part of a legal immigrant dad for his family. He didn't go for what's easy, but for what's worth it. 

There's a lot of goodness in this story, including the men in the Bible Study.

As a Christian, the good things you do will tend to show others the goodness of God (Matthew 5:16).

Build things

"America won't exist if we don't build things." This author founded and runs a manufacturing startup, and he says we must restore our country's capacity to "build things," to manufacture. We must re-build our industrial base, in his theory, because every great power rose to prominence "by building the strongest industrial base of their time."

We could lose our strength. It could happen if we get too comfortable with our success and start to off-shore everything. 

Wait . . that sounds like the present day. As an example, we in the U.S. made five ships last year, while China made 1,000 ships. We lead the world in pharmaceutical R&D but we imported 88% of the active ingredients. "Submarine production has slowed drastically," a reflection of our lack of skilled workers (yesterday's post).

Jobs in the trades can yield a good living. Not everyone must go to college or university.

from The Free Press

Trades shortage

Last week Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit brought together leaders in AI, energy and government. 

Mike Rowe ("Dirty Jobs" show), known as an advocate for the skilled trades, was on one of the panels and had plenty to say. Apparently he predicted the trades shortage 17 years ago, and it's really serious now. Yesterday's post showed that affordable housing is harder to find and more expensive because of it.

His points: 

• Taking shop class out of high school was a shortsighted, "harebrained" idea
• "We've been telling kids for 15 years to learn to code. Well, AI is coming for the coders.  It's not coming for the welders or the steamfitters . ."
• "We need 500,000 electricians in the next couple years. Not hyperbole!"
• Companies building nuclear subs for the Navy are short 80k to 90k skilled workers now
• His foundation awards trade school scholarships

"America is lending money [for college] it doesn't have -- to kids who can't pay it back -- to train them for jobs which no longer exist. That's nuts."

Construction skill

We in the U.S. need more workers in the skilled trades. While artificial intelligence certainly will eliminate many office type jobs, it will never eliminate the demand for electricians, plumbers, carpenters, HVAC and other hands-on jobs.

A crisis in the housing sector illustrates the point. Lack of skilled labor is making housing less affordable. In fact, the National Association of Homebuilders (photo) study concluded that this shortage is impacting the single family home building sector by $10.8 billion per year. Time required to build new homes is about two months longer.

The shortage in skilled trades (not just construction) is why Marvin Ellison is investing millions in training for them (yesterday's video).

It's one big factor why first-time home buyers are having a harder time getting into that first home.

from Forbes

AI in school 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Hannah would assign her students to write a paragraph, or five sentences, or an essay. Many were not able to do it, or complained that it was too hard, or questioned the value of doing the work . . and of course, many completed assignments were written by ChatGPT or another large language model (there's technology to determine that).

Some students saw no value in learning how to write a resume or a cover letter if they could simply make AI do it.

Are these kids learning how to write (photo)? Will their new employer be surprised with the low level of skill these students can execute when they need to think and write in the job environment? 

The problem is not only that turning in a writing assignment that the lazy student did not do is dishonest. It is dishonest, but there's more. Writing well requires a degree of clear thinking, often of making a reasonable argument. If this student ever has to recommend a certain decision to other people, in work or in the community, she will have to think through the options and make a case for the best one. She needs to build that communication skill.

 

WFH research

At yesterday's cafe business, it's not possible to do the job unless you come to the site. But a few work-from-home (WFH) days is possible for a lot of people with 2-3 days at the office. That's how it seems to have settled out now, post-COVID (chart).

 Management usually prefers on-site presence, workers like to be home or remote (chart).

Fruited Plain

 Follow up to this post and post 

Laremy is a Christian. He still runs his cafe in Iowa and still turns out a good product. He still derives satisfaction from it because he sees how it fits into God's good creation.

Fruited Plain Cafe demonstrates the value and mission of work from God's point of view in Genesis, when He tells humanity to "have dominion". The point is not selfish or careless domineering of nature, but rather a sort of co-creation in cooperation with The Creator. 

"I can add my own knowledge, care, and love to coffee beans and milk, using tools that I understand intimately (café owners must also be espresso machine repairmen after all) to create a final product that honors God and blesses my patrons."

This is second level creating along with God--taking what He's provided both in the material world and within the human person (within Laremy and within you and me) to make something "useful and beautiful!"

Fewer Ivy grads

All the disappointment of Americans in their corrupted "Ivy League" universities is showing up in the job market. Forbes reports that "Managers Have Lost Faith in Ivy League Grads."

"[I]n a new Forbes survey 33% of employers say they are less likely to hire Ivy League grads than five years ago, while only 7% say they are more likely to hire them. By contrast, 42% say they are more likely to hire public university grads than five years ago and only 5% say they are less likely to do so."

photo

A manager writing in Wall Street Journal says, "I’m not inclined to hire a graduate from one of America’s elite universities. That marks a change. A decade ago, I relished the opportunity to employ talented graduates of Princeton, Yale, Harvard and the rest. Today? Not so much."

Why? Speaking of Ivy League grad job candidates, he says: 

"Even those who aren’t woke seem damaged by the experience, and they’re deprived of role models."

Hot Bread 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

No matter how good an idea may be, it may fold because of any number of problems. Somehow Hot Bread Kitchen has overcome the inevitable challenges to continue, and even to grow in its mission.

Starting out in the founder's kitchen, they celebrated a 15th anniversary last year, "creating economic opportunity through careers in food" and funded by $6 million in annual donations.

Through training and support, they claim they've put "1500 individuals on the path to economic mobility" whether as employees or entrepreneurs in the food industry. They like to call their members "Breadwinners." 

Hot Bread 2

 Re-post from 2017

Hot Bread Kitchen is both a bakery and an on-the-job baking school in New York City. They specialize in training immigrant and low-income women for a culinary career.

Helping people learn the skills to sustain themselves--and others as well--is an American value.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Gen Z richer

Despite their lack of a "play-based childhood" (last week's posts), somehow Generation Z has turned out to be better off at their age than millennials or baby-boomers were at the same age.

Globally, youth unemployment is way down. When millennials came of age in the U.S., they faced the economic downturn of a recession with reduced opportunities for jobs and careers. Gen Z youth are starting their careers now in different circumstances. It's more of a workers' market, with many jobs going un-staffed for lack of laborers. 

photo

Hourly pay increases for American youth 16-24 years old recently hit 13% (year over year), compared to just a 6% increase for workers 25-54 years old. 

They pay a little less of their income for housing and education compared to what millennials did at their age, and their home ownership rate is higher.

In short (according to The Economist),"In financial terms, Gen Z is doing extraordinarily well."

from The Economist

Men adrift 7

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Creating the beautiful story of his life is all about a man's choices. 

If he's resigned to a boring life without decisions and risk, he will have a life without the joy of growth that comes with taking responsibility for a career, for a family, for a community. "Today’s depressed couch potato scrolling YouTube and watching porn" is building nothing, creating nothing.

As a child I was told more than once not to get my hopes up, which meant that I should expect defeat in the things that interested me. It was confusing. Why be interested in anything then? We need our young men to get a better message than that.

"Make men interested again! Interested people are interesting people." What is there to be interested in? Not much, except "woodworking, art, politics, science, creative writing, naval warfare, cooking, water polo, ornithology, engineering," aviation, trains, law, friendships, management, teaching, hunting, farming-- the ideas are endless.

Let's tell them that it's great to pursue their interests.

photo

from "Make Men Interested Again 

Fired

A couple weeks ago, I advised caution about truth telling: "If you haven't bowed to the wokeness, please speak up. But maybe not at work . . I don't want you to be fired for thinking things through." Maybe you thought "that doesn't happen." Well, I wish it didn't.

But it really does. A snowboarding coach at a Vermont high school was chatting with students, and agreed with one of them, adding that biological sex is the basis for significant physical differences and should apply to sports.

"The next day, Bloch learned the school district had fired him over the matter and barred him from ever being hired again." 

Not only did this coach tell the truth as he sees it in a respectful manner, but he then had the courage to initiate a lawsuit. The school district and the state Agency of Education admitted that he was wrongfully fired. This man had the courage to speak up even in a job and justice prevailed, thank God.

Stealing IP #3

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

While testing some turbines in China, American Super Conductor found that they were running on new code which AMSC had not released yet. They investigated Dejan because he was one of the few who had confidential access, and then found the emails which told the whole story.

image

Sinovel, their biggest client, cancelled all its millions of dollars' worth of orders (of course it did). Dejan confessed and spent a year in Austrian prison. AMSC suffered market value loss of over a billion dollars and had to let 600 employees go out of their previous total of 900. It was devastating.

Afterward, cyber attacks kept coming. AMSC hired a computer security firm, which discovered that the attacks were now coming from a Chinese military unit tasked with spying on North American companies. Thousands of American companies have lost "engineering documents, manufacturing processes, chip designs, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, you name it it's been stolen."

from The Great Brain Robbery

Men adrift 5

Follow-up to this post

Conventional wisdom says that men generally still achieve and succeed in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, math). But even that generality, which used to be true, is being challenged. The challenger is Lawrence Krauss himself, a very big name and authority in science.

In an article published last month, he says "Men are missing in academia." Decades of affirmative action programming and cultural shift have left men behind even in STEM, the subjects where they used to cluster and achieve. 

How did that happen? Krauss says DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) bears some blame. The "vast bureaucracy" of DEI resulted in disturbing new trends: "In a desire to include women and minorities, white males are often excluded . . ."

An unnatural absence of men in education has been noticed. The president of Purdue University says, "Where are all the men?" For asking this reasonable question, he got protests:

photo

Men adrift 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

A bit of a kerfuffle blew up along political party lines when Oliver Anthony released this song, "Rich Men North of Richmond." 

"Nine million views in five days"-- that tells you it went viral. Lots of people like it because it hits a nerve with them, i.e. they identify with its message. His video inspired this comment from a viewer: “And just like that you became the voice of 40 or 50 million working men” (this comment was liked by 11,000 other viewers).

If it weren't for this article, "Distress Music," I would have missed most of the meaning of the whole thing. The article says these men are no longer respected and paid well for the important physical work they do (the chart in yesterday's post shows some of these jobs). They feel ignored by the "rich men north of Richmond," that is, the powerful elite in Washington D.C..

It seems to these distressed men as though our culture is "structured in such a way that young men with strong backs find it hard to prosper by using their traditionally masculine attributes of strength and endurance."

It's one reason why so many men are adrift. But there's more.

from Salvo

(cont'd tomorrow)