Rewiring the American Dream

Training the tradesmen we need starts with understanding why these careers are so worthwhile

When people in the public sphere advocate for Americans to pursue careers in the skilled trades, the discussion is largely limited to talking about labor shortages and ease of entry because of these shortages, a deficit I’ve discussed at length. Bringing facts about our atrophied skilled workforce to light is necessary if we hope to address it. It is fuel for the politician and inspiration for the policymaker. The problem is that it is neither of those things for the young, discerning American or the American adult considering a career change.

The person reading this is likely a degreed professional—perhaps someone working in the policymaking or journalism world. Why do you do what you do? Was it because you were told that there was some cataclysmic shortage of policymakers or journalists? I imagine not. Whichever way you hash it, you, like most people, pursued your career because you believed that a combination of your interest, work ethic, and talent would offset the risks associated with pursuing a living at it. People aren’t typically choosing what to do with their lives purely because there’s an opportunity to be an employee quickly and forever. Which is why harping about labor shortages and ease of entry won’t be the catalyst in addressing the issue of needing more skilled tradespeople in America.

Nothing is more helpful in doing so than anecdote. While it seems that the stigma surrounding a career in the trades is slowly lifting, the current advocacy by politicians, journalists, and think tanks doesn’t serve as an incredible source of inspiration for people to enter the skilled trades. They lack the power of personal anecdote. They can’t speak to why careers in the skilled trades are personally rewarding and professionally worthwhile in a detailed way. They can’t tell you first-hand about how going through trade school can birth an awareness of one’s intellectual capabilities. They can’t speak personally about overcoming kitchen table level challenges by wielding the unique socioeconomic benefits of working in the skilled trades. They can’t tell you about the practical and profound wisdom you can obtain throughout one of these careers in areas ranging from pragmatic on-the-job maxims to heady philosophy. These are the kinds of opportunities and learning experiences that excite a person about a career. This advocacy and encouragement can only come from someone who has lived in it and discovered it for themselves.

My time as an electrician has allowed me to experience a bounty of gifts that the job plainly offers: intellectual empowerment, socioeconomic acceleration, and practical and purposeful wisdom. Topics which are far less repetitive and boring to discuss to the eager advocate—and far more exciting to consider by the potential applicant.

Intellectual Empowerment:

My academic prowess on paper hovered between poor to average for most of my school career. I cared more about goofing off and making friends than I did about studying, but I was fiendishly curious and obsessive, hunting down whatever books, documentaries, articles, and essays that I could about the topics that interested me and consuming them repeatedly. These interests could range from politics and literature to mechanics and building computers. At one point during high school, I was obsessed with the design and engineering behind the Mitsubishi Zero Fighter and the meticulousness of its chief creator, Jiro Horikoshi. Only a profoundly organized mind could engineer such an impressive piece of machinery. It amazed me. The plane was an example of where human, bookish genius was given temporal form. Fueled by a desire to understand the plane more, I drove to a local hobby shop, and asked the cashier if they had a model of the A6M Zero for sale. He said they didn’t, and tried to sell me a P-51 Mustang instead. I scoffed at his redirection, and went home empty handed. I settled with drawing copies of various exploded-view schematics of the plane I found online, hoping that it would help commit aspects of the plane’s construction to memory. This meticulousness didn’t carry over into other important areas of my life. Another item I can recall from this period is being stressed out because I had a D-minus in Algebra II.

I was never interested in the purely conceptual. Math or science only interested me to the degree that I could grab ahold of it and interact with it. I never thought of myself as a very smart guy. It wasn’t until I entered electrical trade school that I started to think that my brain wasn’t completely smooth. My time in trade school running parallel with working full time gave me context for the theories I was learning in the classroom. Concepts like AC theory and Ohm’s Law, in union with understanding the National Electrical Code (NEC), fascinated me because I could complete installations and wire equipment properly based upon proper application of those concepts and codes. Instead of arbitrary knowledge landing nowhere, I had the privilege of seeing my intellectual pursuits manifest before my eyes.

Throughout my career, I have met many people who didn’t know what they were capable of until they entered the trades. They make wonderful livings as electricians, foremen, project managers, and business owners. And within my one branch of the skilled-trade universe, many have pursued specializations in the countless avenues of the electrical field from low voltage technicians and life safety system designers to power quality analysts and motor control specialists. All of these roles require intimate knowledge of niche aspects of the electrical trade as well as the advanced concepts that give various electrical applications power. And the stories of fellow tradesmen realizing intellectual potential once released from the desk and chair learning environment are endless.

Socioeconomic Acceleration:

Delayed progress is a wet blanket on the flames of potential. I can extend some understanding to those in college, difficult situations, or any other variable state of being. But prolonged adolescence or aimless professional wandering certainly repels prosperity. Entering a career in the trades serves to quickly provide a static existence. The moment you enter your training, you have also entered your career and begin reaping the financial benefits that come with it. This means that you can begin establishing financial liquidity and avoid the yoke of debt that college graduates are so often saddled with; one that, on average, hovers between $40,000-$50,000 and takes 20 years to pay off. All of that compound interest buys as much delayed progress for college graduates as it does profit for lenders. By avoiding this, you not only avoid debt, but can chase the things that school, debt, or aimlessness prevent many young Americans from pursuing: marriage, family, and homeownership.

Since I dove into my working career shortly after high school, my wife and I got married when we were 20 and 21, respectively. Shortly after I turned 23, we bought our first home. A couple of years later, we had our first child. A couple of years after that, we had our second. Then, we built and moved into a new family home. Soon after, we had our third child. Today, my wife has taken up the role of stay-at-home mom, and my commitment to my trade led me into a management position—a role that continues to offer me great joy and rewarding challenges to this day. The financial liquidity of our early years—along with precise budgeting, goal-setting, and avoidance of personal debt—continues to produce a harvest of abundance that allows itself to be reinvested or mobilized towards our goals today. A trajectory that I have seen as hardly unique in my field.

Many people have secured comfortable livelihoods in the skilled trades; something that many young people today consider a myth relegated to America’s past. But not being married to the college pathway may challenge this notion for many. Buckling down after high school and entering into a career in the trades could expedite your entry into early homeownership, an immense boon in the pursuit of security and wealth building for the average American, while also avoiding membership in the crushing student-loan debt pool, which currently sits at $1.7 trillion according to the Education Data Initiative. These benefits are monumental when paired with an average starting salary of approximately $42,000 for an apprentice electrician, increasing to around $62,000 upon achieving licensure, and then continuing to increase over time. With professional specialization, this amount can shoot up exponentially higher; the average salary for utility line workers and construction managers hovers around $86,000 and $105,000, respectively. However, electrical work isn’t everyone’s thing. Perhaps pursuing a career as an elevator installer making an average of around $103,000 annually or a pipe fitter making around $62,000 annually might be a better fit.

If you find yourself facing the prospect of personal and financial growth with the unfortunate, common bleakness of our time, I’d encourage you to gaze upon other horizons. Perhaps facing the world with a pair of wire strippers and diagonal cutters will grant you a more formidable stature than your desk and laptop.

Practical and Purposeful Wisdom:

It took a moment for me to enter the trades. After high school, I worked in a pigment factory for a time, and made a great living. By the time I was 22, I was making close to $60,000 a year. However, my pay eventually stagnated, and I wanted to pursue something new. I spoke with a manager that I respected about this, and asked him how he knew what he was meant to do.

“That’s dumb. You aren’t meant to do anything,” he said. “But you can do a lot of things. And several of those things you can do well. And I bet a few of those things you can do better than most people. Don’t bring fate into it. Find out a handful of careers that cater toward those few golden things and pick one. But finish your shift first.”

I have hung on to this unabashed, completely helpful piece of wisdom since it fell from his chewing tobacco-packed mouth. I worked at the factory for quite a bit longer, but after being passed up for a management opportunity I decided to try my luck elsewhere. I determined that I was good at finding the relationship between things within processes, and I always loved taking apart and rebuilding electronics. So, the electrical trade was the practical answer to the profound wisdom of pigment-factory-manager guy.

Wisdom, both practical and profound, is bustling within a career in the trades. In certain situations, you will discover what you are capable of, as well as where you are utterly lacking. Two important situations for any human being to encounter and rencounter with as much frequency as possible. There was a day early in my career where the foreman I was working with gave me a pat on the back and told me he was going to have me do something more challenging for my next task. I was going to wire a transformer, a piece of electrical equipment that, in typical applications, “transforms” a higher primary voltage to a lower secondary voltage. I was less than a year into the trades, with no formal schooling, but I reminded myself that if I just followed the wiring diagrams on the equipment, it would be fine. So, I got to work. After completing the installation, I brought the foreman over to review. “Against all odds… you’ve done it, little fella.” I felt like I had just overcome the greatest challenge ever presented to mankind.

Later in the day, a manager at our company stopped onsite. This manager made his way to the top of the company after starting his career as a little baby apprentice like me. He is also regarded as an electrical genius by everyone in our company. The foreman told him that I wired the transformer without help. The manager walked over to me and said, “I heard you wired your first transformer today. Let’s take a look.”

I’m not going to lie; I thought I was about to get an accolade from the king. He stood looking into the transformer for a few moments. “You know… I could teach a monkey to do this.” When these words left his mouth, I was just happy that I didn’t have my fists on my hips and my chin in the air. “The most important thing,” he said, “is understanding how the equipment we install performs their functions, not simply how to install them. Otherwise, you are just an installer. Not an electrician.” He went on to explain, in considerable detail, how a transformer works. Everything from magnetic flux across coils to the magnetic cores within the transformers that aid in the process of imposing a new voltage. 

I have tried to apply this lesson to nearly every learning pursuit I’ve faced, both personal and professional, since the day he said it. The generalized, non-electrical lesson is this: have context in all that you do, otherwise, you will only be prepared in fair weather. Sure, I installed the transformer. But I wouldn’t have been able troubleshoot any issues that may have occurred with it because I didn’t actually understand it. Whether you are engaged in war and politics or wiring transformers, this lesson, aptly applied, will serve you abundantly.

Not Superiority, But Equivalency

I’m not claiming that a career in the skilled trades is better than a degreed career; an army of talented colleges graduates will also be necessary for America to innovate and prosper. But we also will need an army of those who can bring temporal form to designs, theories, and concepts. Blue collar and white collar are married in their goals of generating commerce and progress. I couldn’t do what I do at work every day if it weren’t for our engineers’ ability to draft complex and detail-saturated designs. It’s a dance that looks quite pathetic if one side or the other is lacking.

But the standard fare of the past several decades is to assume that a career in the skilled trades is lesser than careers at the end of traditional college pathways. This is wrong. The skilled trades can offer ample intellectual, financial, and philosophical opportunities on par with, and in times surpassing, degreed jobs. And if it is in a spirit of superiority that others deem a career in the skilled trades as lesser, then I think that bears squashing.

The American dream may seem elusive to some. But things appear fairly bright for the men and women I work with. Ultimately, America will need proper recruitment of both the bookish and the brawny to achieve our goals to adequately engage the national and individual challenges of modernity—and not miss great opportunities to build a stronger future together.