I’D RATHER BE A WELDER THAN A WRITER

I’D RATHER BE A WELDER THAN A WRITER

Want your kids to still love you when they’re in their 30’s? When they’ve started work at a real job, busted their butts for a few years, maybe had a child or two of their own, and hopefully come to appreciate how hard you had to work – at whatever you did – in order to provide them with viable options and serious opportunities for a strong and secure future. If so, then now’s a great time to do your offspring a real favor (wherever they are on the education and employment treadmill) and tell them that - for at least the next decade or so - the smart money is on vocational training, OJT and concrete careers rather than on automatically investing four or more years on college and grad school to be followed by a fruitless search for employment in areas of the economy which are already disappearing every day. Right now, I’d rather be a longshoreman than a lawyer – a builder rather than a banker – and, for sure, a plumber rather than a poet.

The ugly alternative for millions of students whose parents like so many lemmings followed the traditional route and fumbled their kids’ future is to be condemned after college to a few years of wishful thinking, lots of numbing networking, trying go-nowhere gigs, launching endless pleading emails to family and friends, accompanied by a challenging clump of college debt that will likely be an albatross around their necks for decades. In addition to the insufferable and unavoidable loan repayment load, these graduates suffer from the deluded and misleading indoctrination offered by the unhappy faculties of most colleges and universities. These Ph.D. fantasy factories do a miserable job of setting realistic expectations and goals for their graduates.

A-range grades at Harvard and Yale represent almost 80% of all grades given to students at these two schools. You might ask yourself how those “participation” awards compare to your own real-world experiences of the typical distribution of team members’ relative performances and contributions and how this kind of “everyone’s a star and a winner” crap is helpful in preparing these students for the vagaries and ups and downs of the working world. Inflated grading on a curve which starts at the top of the stack doesn’t help anyone outside of these institutions.

The reason we’re seeing so many employers unhappy of late with the newest crop of employees has a lot more to do with attitude problems, unreal expectations, and accelerated entitlement than with actual aptitude especially because in the real world of work these days, you learn a cruel lesson early on – that the amount of education you allegedly need to get a job has risen much faster than the amount of education you actually need to do a job for three main reasons.

First, the present occupants of the jobs don’t want company or new, younger threats to their own positions, so they raise the bar, expand the requirements, and effectively pull up the drawbridge. But much to their dismay, the inbound tide is unstoppable. By the end of 2024, there will be more Gen Z’s in the workforce than Baby Boomers and they’re coming for those very jobs.

Second, there are fewer and fewer available jobs in certain “soft skill” sectors like banking, finance, and publishing because post-pandemic the mid-level positions in every organization are being compressed or entirely eliminated so the competition for scarcer slots is fiercer than ever and the paper credentials required are more substantial even though they may have little bearing on the candidate’s actual ability to do the job in question. In the long haul, preparation, perspiration and passion ultimately win out over diplomas from even the fanciest schools.

And, of course, the third reason is the growth and expansion of disruptive technologies which are changing the work requirements in many of these fields. There’s no doubt that automation, robotics and A.I. are job killers, but the nasty little secret is that the expected devastation is highly targeted, selective, and primarily aimed at middle management, administrators, editors, and bean counters.

But the good news is that the front-line folks – the ones who need to deal with and deliver the goods and services to the ultimate consumers and customers – the ones who work with their hands and their heads (whether or not they’re augmented by mechanical assistants) - will always have secure positions. This is true across the board – whether it’s construction, maintenance, early education, nursing and elder care, or anything in hospitality and retail. You’re always going to need a meat sack at the end of the production line where the rubber meets the road if you care at all about customer satisfaction and results.

George Will says we don’t have enough trained workers to build our nuclear subs any longer and those vessels are the most formidable tools we have these days to defend our shores and discourage our enemies on multiple fronts. (See https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/09/navy-nuclear-submarines-shortage/.) We’re going to need millions of new team members to support our most fundamental industries and they’re not going to be coming exclusively from traditional colleges and universities.

I’m increasingly convinced that vocational education, industry apprenticeships, and union labor may save our kids as well as our ships. We all learn by doing, not just by watching or listening. It’s a “put up or shut up” world these days. When you’re working side-by-side with others who’ve been there and done it, the ongoing “education” isn’t limited to specific physical skills, you learn a lot about cooperation, connection, community and work ethic. Unlike college, it's never just about you.

The bottom line – I’d rather be a welder than a writer – a car mechanic instead of a copy editor – or a nurse rather than a novelist.