The skilled trades industry projects 1.7 million job openings per year through 2035. They have no idea who will fill them. This is what happens when an entire generation was told welding is for losers and everyone needs a marketing degree.
The report cites an aging workforce, high turnover, and relentless job creation. Translation: the olds are retiring, the kids keep quitting, and nobody's lining up to replace either group. Experts are baffled. Truly baffled. As if telling seventeen-year-olds that college is the only path to success wouldn't create a plumber shortage fourteen years later.
Here's the math. Seventeen hundred thousand openings annually. For thirteen years. That's twenty-two million jobs. The industry doesn't know where twenty-two million tradespeople will materialize from. Maybe they'll import them. Maybe they'll clone Mike Rowe. Maybe they'll just stand around construction sites pointing at exposed wire and hoping it fixes itself.
The turnover rate is high because the work is hard and the pay structure rewards guys who've been doing it since Nixon. Young workers show up, get treated like garbage by some fifty-eight-year-old electrician named Dale, then leave for a warehouse job with air conditioning. Dale retires. The cycle continues. Nobody learns anything.
Retail traders will ignore this completely. They're too busy losing money on leveraged ETFs to notice that civilization requires functioning toilets. When their pipes burst in 2034 and no plumber exists within a seventy-mile radius, they'll panic-sell their portfolios to pay some unlicensed guy named Garrett four thousand dollars to stop the leak with duct tape. Garrett will accept payment in Bitcoin. The toilet will break again in six weeks.
The trades are begging for workers while universities are begging for students while everyone is begging for relevance. Nobody wins except Garrett.
Leave a Comment