Posted on 07/29/2016 8:05:55 AM PDT by pinochet
If you were to give career advice to a high school student of average intellectual ability (he is not going to medical or engineering school), what kind of advice would it be?
We have a shortage of well-trained car mechanics, plumbers, electricians, painters, roofers, and the like. But we have all these BA graduates walking around jobless.
My grandmother taught in NYC Public for 55 years. She always used to say, “Somebody’s gotta clean the subways”.
Get your BA in whatever, get a broad education.
Then plan to go to work at the ground level, sweeping up the shop. In a decade, if you are smart and you work hard and they learn to count on you, you’ll be running the place.
And then at some point maybe you buck up and open your own shop.
The point of a broad liberal education is being educated. It doesn’t guarantee you a check in the mail; the biggest problem we have is that kids don’t understand that. Get educated. Then go to work. If you don’t know where to start, go see the Navy recruiter. He’ll know what to do with you.
Right now, the college population could be cut by 75% and the result for the 25% who remained would improve.
I beg to differ. Employers ARE at least partly to blame.
They’ve fallen for the sales pitch of the education establishment that “we will pop-out grads who are fully prepared to go to work for you. You need not invest one penny of your own to train them.”
And I could fill a book with stories of employers who made bad hires just cause they fell for the fancy degree on the resume.
True story...I worked for a company that had to file a lot of legal paperwork related to permits, licenses, and business visas for their people to travel to foreign countries. They were spending a fortune on legal fees.
Looking to enhance the bottom line they decided to bring this function in house. They trained a young woman who had been our receptionist. She only had a high-school diploma, but was bright and hard-working. The kind of person who, if you show them once how to do a job properly, can do it damned well.
After a year her rejection rate on the visa applications was LOWER than that of the attorneys whom they had been paying $300 per hour.
Skilled trade should be the way to go for a number of people. HOWEVER, they need to keep their eyes on eventually starting their business in the skilled trade and developing their management skills. The trades take toll on the body and you don’t want to be 50+ still trying to do the work that the 20-somethings are doing.
Military can be a good option too if the kid is physically fit or willing to become physically fit.
For me, the best education is 4 years in the service and a set of Harvard Classics. Three hundred bucks on ebay.
I tell the young guys to learn a trade. Whether or not they listened, who knows.
“Dunno the stats for sure, but I would bet that anybody with skills in plumbing, or electrician, or any other solid skill, is in much more demand than any recent graduate with the word “studies”, or “science” in his degree title.”
May be. But when I once posted for the need for a plumber, I got responses from a dozen local plumbers within an hour. So, not sure if the supply-demand works in their favor. I agree that if you own a plumbing business, you might be set. But most plumbers are probably scraping by. There must be stats on plumber average salary versus an average science major.
“Its not like demand for plumbers goes down over time, especially with this generation that requires safety warnings on screw drivers to prevent them from jamming them into their eye sockets”
That could be true, but plumbing is such as niche that you will not be employed as anything else if that field goes away(it may or may not depending on the underlying plumbing tech, which is bound to change with smart homes around the corner). With a hard science/math/eng and years of applied experience, you can always switch careers and take almost everything with you in terms of experience/knowledge accumulated over the years.
I would suggest that students seek degrees in Gender studies, Black studies, and Women’s studies. That is if I hated those students and wanted them to waste tens of thousands of dollars for NOTHING! Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, brick masons, carpet layers, can all make great money. Some BAs are useful, like history, and literature, but they don’t usually lead to a well paying job. The value of a college education is way overblown. There are many BAs, MAs, PhDs out there that are working in grocery stores, and other low wage jobs. Nothing wrong with any kind of work, but why rack up a huge student loan debt when there is no great paying job in the end? Some degrees were created by fools, and only fools major in them.
I recall, back during Peak Occutard, about a tenured teacher who resigned his position, went for a Master’s in “Urban Puppetry”, and then complained loudly about his lack of ability to find a job AND his massive debt from Grad School. . .
As a black female welder she is always in demand.
Is doing well and drives a very nice car.
We have friends whose daughter started a maid service. A topless maid service and she's rolling in $$$...............
So, as a result, they looked for external "markers", like licenses, certifications, and degrees.
Because, apparently general aptitude tests are racist...
Me and higher math never got along but I am fairly good at fixing things and problem solving.
I would have thought that I would have been a decent engineer.
I got hurt badly in the early years of the wun financially but after a while in the wilderness got a very good job in the IT field. My previous career in TV production which was fun was dying a long while back. Most of what I did doesn’t really exist any more.
Trade schools are they ONLY way to go today most are only two years and these guys and gals make bucks, welders, electricians, carpenters are in demand most are Union (which I hate) however benefits with a union are great!!! If they start their own business EVEN BETTER!!!
Unless employers want to be sued, they must require applicants for certain jobs to have a piece of paper called a “college diploma”. That is the pool they must select from. How they make decisions within that pool is another matter. As in every other part of business, sometimes good decisions are made and sometimes not. If the company has someone doing “HR” the first requirement is checking boxes to minimize employment law risk. You’d be hard pressed to find a business owner who believes that HS or college grads in general are prepared to work. Before Griggs people like the receptionist had many more opportunities. The problems in Griggs was that blacks at Duke Power didn’t do as well as whites, so it was assumed by the USSC that the company’s tests were racially biased. You’ve seen the same story litigated over and over again in, for example, police and fire department promotions.
I had always thought the same thing too...
2 years into my “forever job” just we were laid off for the first time in the companies history. I went back to Wyo and go a job with the Electricians Union, thats where I found out just how crappy a bad boss can be. Thats the only job I literally ever walked off of...
The term “starving artists” exists for a reason.
“gibmedats abounding”
Are the Gibmedats related to the Dindoonuffins?
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