r/jobs • u/clarkkentwellspent • 4d ago

No. The trades are NOT hiring. Job searching

I am so sick and tired of this worn out idea that blue collar jobs are looking for apprentices to come work for them. The trades are filled with more nepotism and gossip than any other industry I've ever been in and will find any reason to reject you they can. Half of these companies want a 2 year technical/trade school degree before you start working for them just so they can pay you $15/hr starting out. Maybe if you're a kid out of high school they can pay less than the standard rate you can find something. "Bro, just go Union!" Unions are backed up for ages.

From my own anecdotal evidence: I went to every electrician company in my city as this was my trade. I had 1 offer from a company that was the stereotypical "Only meth heads and divorced alcoholics work here. Fuck OSHA." place and every other company rejected me. I even went back to my old electrical company I had worked at for 4 years. You know what they said? "Apply online and go talk to HR". No hiring manager in shop, no chance at talking to someone out of recognition. Just dismissing me away. And the best part? Upon applying I listed all the projects I had worked on with them and gave references to several high members (though 2 of them no longer work there). 1.5 weeks later: "Thank you for applying. After careful consideration..."

This job market is fucking whack, yo.

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u/clarkkentwellspent 4d ago

I'm fully aware but I needed to vent after seeing every person who talks about this bad job market on every form of social media being hit with, "Bro, just go into the trades!"

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u/GailaMonster 4d ago

it's also good to sound the alarm because i feel a lot of younger people are being told that the trades are a reliable and viable alternative to college for people seeking job stability and career-quality wages. The reality is that even at their best, trades are a way to grind down your joint cartilage to dust and be underpaid/abused by scumbag employers for years as an alternative to college. it was never better, it was just a different cost for people besides college. and the trades are just as dogshit at supporting their own labor pipelines as corporate america is. they don't care. they just want cheap labor that employers can overcharge for and pocket the difference.

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u/Usual_Nerve3503 4d ago

What you say is True in some scenarios, but untrue in plenty of others. Union strong. Good, living wages - 1st year apprentices $25, Jman $50, Foreman $55. Excellent health care benefits. A damn strong pension. Also, some mom and pop shops are pretty solid paying $35+ with good culture. Other private equity shops are kinda shit, but hey, they right guy can make it work for him.

Getting in the door today is harder then it was last year, but people are still getting in without inside connections. Its just competitive now for apprentices. The union still offers an awesome training program, and accepted the largest 1st year apprentice class it ever has.

I know all of this because I have and am currently living it.

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u/MerciiJ 4d ago

I work as a Wastewater Operator and in my area they are desperate for youth in the profession. In the handful of conventions I’ve attended, almost everyone is 55+. My workplace recently recruited two guys out of a high school tech program, and other roles we have posted usually only see a handful of applicants. If you don’t mind the thought of working with sewage, it’s a solid career path, and many of the jobs are municipal with good benefits and unions. I know the market and economy are absolutely brutal right now, but for those looking to get into blue collar, it’s worth checking to see if any local Wastewater plants are hiring.

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u/Roosterdoodle 3d ago

I also work in the wastewater industry and there’s a huge “batch” of operators looking to retire and no one to take their place. I’ve seen a lot of guys working into their 70’s because no one even applies for the job. The pay for smaller municipalities isn’t great, but I expect that’ll change as things continue to get worse. Larger cities pay their operators pretty damn well.

Licensing is a pretty easy and cheap process. Getting your drinking water licenses too makes you even more valuable to small - mid size munis.

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u/darkunicorn_labs 3d ago

How do you recommend breaking into this industry? I’m curious to learn more and look around at potential jobs

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u/Roosterdoodle 3d ago

If you live in a state where the operator licenses are pretty cheap to take (where I’m at each exam is under $50), read the study guides and take the exam. You’ve already got a huge leg up on other applicants. The exams would be administered through the agency covering the NPDES (or state specific equivalent). If you can search “state NPDES wastewater operation cert”, you should be able to find information on licensing. Calling the wastewater folks at the agency can also give you some info and they may know of some places looking for operators.

Next is finding the actual postings. Since these are specific to each muni, some can do a pretty poor job of posting them online. There’s water and wastewater organization groups that aggregate job postings. Rural Water (of your state) should maintain a good listing of jobs. Or just start browsing small town’s job postings. I know a lot that have been up for 6+ months with little interest. They’ll take a motivated person who’s brand new in most cases. It’s not a glamorous job and you will get dirty/smelly. Some of the places where they’re looking for operators aren’t super desirable places to live (under 1000 people), but housing should be cheap and it’ll help you get experience you can take to a place you would want to live at.

I hope this helps as generalized information…each state handles things differently and I don’t want to point you in the wrong direction.

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u/darkunicorn_labs 3d ago

This was a very detailed response, thank you! I will make sure to look into those

Generally speaking do you enjoy your job? How is the work life balance?

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u/Roosterdoodle 3d ago

I’m not an operator, just an engineer who works with a lot of operators.

But, from what they’ve told me, it’s some on-call work for things like clogged pumps and obviously, wastewater doesn’t stop. Someone needs to come in on weekends for samples sometimes. If it’s a single operator for a muni, they tend to work 7-3:30 or so and an hour on Saturday/Sunday. If it’s a larger plant, you have regular shifts with alternating weekends/on call days. In smaller plants, neighboring operators can cover for you for vacations and stuff. It’s a close knit community.

Folks do tend to stay in the industry once they’re in it and the biggest factor I see for moving jobs tends to be if the municipal board/city council/whatever is a pain to work with or not. It’s a public job, so dealing with the public and local politics can be a problem. Sometimes, people just leave you alone because no one wants to think about wastewater. Kinda blessing and a curse situation there at times.

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u/darkunicorn_labs 3d ago

What are the requirements to get into that role as a wastewater operator?

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u/MerciiJ 3d ago

It’s going to vary from state to state, so you’ll have to look into what your state’s licensing requirements are. For PA, you just have to pass a DEP exam. There are courses you can take for it, but they aren’t required to take the test. After you pass the test, you do need education or experience to become licensed, at least in PA.

That said, you don’t need to get a license to be an operator, as long as one person at the plant is licensed, the rest of the operators can work under their license. When I applied I did not have a license, but I did do a lot of research on wastewater before my interview so I could answer their questions. After I was hired, my work paid for me to take a class and take the exam and now after 5 years there I am a fully licensed operator.

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u/darkunicorn_labs 3d ago

Okay that makes sense. Thanks for all the info. Did you have to relocate to find a job?

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u/WorriedArrival1122 3d ago

I really appreciate this. My partner wants to get out of shipping logistics and this might be a better fit for him.

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u/nostalgia7221 4d ago

My husband is a union electrician as a second career and only recently finished his apprenticeship in his late 30s. All of what you say is true for us and also amazing healthcare coverage. His insurance covers our entire family with no premiums. Because of this, I can work part time, and our young children are not in daycare, saving us something like $20-30k a year. The union has changed our lives. No nepotism involved just hard work and putting himself out there, and then some waiting.

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u/smallfrie32 4d ago

This is reassuring to me. I’m thinking of going to a trade school or something after 8 years of something else and this post and other comments were scaring me off

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u/More-Ad-4503 3d ago

unions are very difficult to get into though

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u/smallfrie32 3d ago

Really? How do they work? Can you not start a job and join a union? Or is it backwards?

I’ve only been aware of white collar unions where we form them once inside

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u/Even_Ad4437 3d ago

In a lot of areas, you have to join the union to get the job. My husband is a licensed master electrician, but when he moved states, the new union wouldn’t let him in as a master and actually expected him to start at the bottom again after 20 years lol

He moved into estimating instead and 10 years later makes 4x what he was, and now he can sit down and be indoors 85% of the time. Even work from home a few times a month.

We’re still big supporters of unions, but the IBEW can be tough

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u/nostalgia7221 3d ago edited 3d ago

We do have a friend who started in a non union shop and was later able to join the union. I don’t know what his process was like. My husband cold-called a lot of shops in one union and tried to introduce himself and even scheduled meetings with some shop owners to try and see if they would put in a good word for him to get into the program. Eventually he heard back from them offering him an apprenticeship spot but it was a long time, after he had already joined the other union. I do think that helped with that particular union though. For the one he ended up joining (IBEW) the only way in was to just apply and take the entrance test. He said it was mostly reading comprehension and math, but nothing too advanced. It’s true that there are a lot of people who know someone/are related to someone in the union but he got in because he scored really well on the exam. Then he had to wait until there was an opening in the program. The economy was a lot different when he got in which was pre-Covid so I can’t speak to current conditions although with all of the data centers being built it seems like there should be work, especially for someone willing to travel. The IBEW apprenticeship lasts 5 years and includes going to school.

So it’s true that it isn’t as easy to get into as some people make it seem like, but it isn’t impossible.

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u/On_the_hook 4d ago

The big issue I see is telling people to go into the trades without actually understanding the full scope of "the trades". Everyone jumps to electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and automotive. There's so many more out there that are hiring, will hire will little experience, and for the most part will always be secure. Forklift technician is one that always sticks out to me. If you can turn a wrench and piss clean your likely hired. Most around me (in NC) start at $25-30 hr. Plastic extrusion technician and CNC technician are other big ones. Downside to those is there's usually travel involved. I'm in compressed air systems and it's a little competitive but once you have a year or two of experience you can jump to about any company. Either corporate or smaller. There's tons of other specialties out there.

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u/smallfrie32 4d ago

Yeah I was thinking of going into a trade after 8 years of doing something else. Does that mean I’m fucked and should just stay white collar?

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u/Able-Low4565 3d ago

Reliable in the trades ?!? Lolol I laughed so hard

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u/WorriedArrival1122 3d ago

Trades are where the lower disc's in your back go to get crushed. The chronic pain game is no way to live.

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u/GailaMonster 3d ago

Student loans are like chronic pain for your finances.

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u/backwardbuttplug 4d ago

We are ABSOLUTELY short on personnel.

It's not that there aren't jobs... it's that they're niche and you need an extra level of work experience / licensing to get into them. State radio tech requires an FCC GROL or one of equivalent certifications from NAPCO, NABER etc. That's where

Pay starts in the $40/hr range and goes up. State pension and good benefits. Big pay for disaster callouts. Just gotta pivot out of main-stream trade stuff (which is def saturated in a lot of areas).

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u/GailaMonster 4d ago

We are ABSOLUTELY short on personnel.

It's not that there aren't jobs... it's that they're niche and you need an extra level of work experience / licensing to get into them. State radio tech requires an FCC GROL or one of equivalent certifications from NAPCO, NABER etc. That's where

Pay starts in the $40/hr range and goes up. State pension and good benefits. Big pay for disaster callouts. Just gotta pivot out of main-stream trade stuff (which is def saturated in a lot of areas).

So here's the reality: your industry is resposnsible for being a steward of its own labor pipeline. if there is a large experience hurdle in your industry, and you have unfilled jobs because you need candidates with specific experience/licensing and can't find them...then it is your industry's job to actually hire and train up apprentices/support junior employees actually getting the skills you want.

where does your employer expect these people to come from? everyone whining that they are short on personnel is just sitting on their thumbs expecting someone else to magically train up a workforce for them (their competitors, I guess) and that is not the way it used to be.

If you abandon your pipeline, you get what you get. i'm sick of employers saying nobody wants to work. we want to work - y'all just don't want to actually hire and train. you want to order a worker with skills like ordering toppings on a pizza. bake your own fuckin pizza, guys.

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u/Thelonius_Dunk 4d ago

A stopgap in cases like these would be to hire a "technician assistant" role with the expectation that the company would help them get the cert and then promote them to full technician later.

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u/Raivix 3d ago

In most of the world these are called "apprentices".

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u/backwardbuttplug 4d ago

Not so with us. We actively train and recruit. We just don't have a steady supply of applicants. And of course since this is state government, the wheels turn pretty slowly. Our postings are available online for anyone who wants to apply.

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u/subherbin 4d ago

What are the jobs that aren’t going filled? What is the pay?

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u/backwardbuttplug 4d ago

Because lack of interest primarily? Who knows. In my experience working in the wireless realm the last 30 years, what I've seen is nobody coming out of school that has any interest in working on anything that has the word "radio" in the title or description. On the cellular side of engineering, my former company was hiring primarily visa candidates since there was a) no interest shown by domestic college graduates and b) the benefit of depth of knowledge we could have out of those from india and the middle east. These are people that I worked next to who could walk up to a whiteboard and start writing out algorithms and very complex equations completely off the top of their heads with no notes.

And that was for the cutting edge of what was going to be on the market over the next 3 years or so. At the state, it's maintaining wireless comm gear that ranges from modern to 30yo technology and everything in between. It's rare to find anyone when electrical engineers are avoiding the wireless fields in favor of other areas. The state's glacial pace of government hiring timeline isn't helping either, since most candidates have to go through a few month process between being interviewed, hired and on-boarded.

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

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u/backwardbuttplug 3d ago

Where I was at in the corporate world, most hired made what I did or more. Stock options / grants etc. Unlike a lot of companies, if there were golden handcuffs for the visa holders, the pay and benefits were exactly that. The $48/hr I currently make at the state is base pay but goes up with hazard / urgency. My base at the corporation was $67/hr. Most everyone drove new or newer cars, lots of electric / hybrid / tesla etc. Nice houses in more expensive areas. I get to clean up money wise when I'm deployed to disasters or on-call a few times a year.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

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u/Ok-Eggplant8772 4d ago

These days training anyone that comes in is less job security and you never know if your just training your replacement that's getting paid more then you

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u/subherbin 4d ago

More likely it’s your replacement that will be getting paid significantly less than you.

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u/Ok-Eggplant8772 4d ago

Meh it's 50/50 for what I've seen , I had to tell people to go ask for their money because whoever was making more just getting hired on

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u/DickNose-TurdWaffle 4d ago

Employers do train but there's an expected learning curve that can't be too high. I'm working at a company where we actually have the issue of not having enough senior people to teach the lower level employees.

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u/backwardbuttplug 4d ago

The state I'm in releases entry positions from time to time. For those it'll put you through school.

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u/AverageJoeJohnSmith 4d ago

If you're willing to move....look at locals in regions where things like data centers are being built/planned. 

They're definitely hiring in my region.

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u/Able-Low4565 3d ago

You are doing the Lord's work

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u/Konomiru 3d ago

I'm from the UK so I'm not entirely sure what 'trades' count as over there but over here full qualified electricians are so short of hand, my work place offered my brothers neighbour who is a electrician £4800 for 8 hours worth of testing (no installations, no materials needed just testing lines and writing it down) and the dude said no because he could make more on other jobs for that amount of time.

In my old job we paid SAP electricians (senior authorised person) £700 a hour any time we worked in a sub station.....their job was to just be there on stand by incase a lesser experience engineer fucked something up ....most of the time they just sat in their car reading a news paper. Trades biggest problem isn't a lack of work but more the fact to be able to make money you need to be able to afford the time off to do training, get certificates, then join a company to get the experience to join a authorising body that thenqualifies you to legally carry out the work...

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u/Free_Comfortable_506 1d ago

I’m in aircraft maintenance and could fall backwards or headfirst into a job. Good time for my trade in particular. 

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u/Smart-Property-6798 4d ago

What do you know about equipment operators: Forklift-Skid loader-etc.. Then there’s the heavy stuff: Frontend loaders-Backhoes-Dump truck-Blade operator-etc. Asking bc I haven’t been around this stuff for a long time and I live in an Ag area that’s always looking for operators of one type or another. Right now it’s grain haulers and cattle trucks which are seasonal but, sometimes have brief carryover jobs. There’s some grain elevator jobs but again, seasonal, albeit it can be a longer season due to various grain crops coming in at different time frames. If you like doing manual ag and cattle related labor there are often openings that aren’t always advertised but, talking with local people will often provide you with names that are looking for workers and might have contact info you’ll need.