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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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Why is learning a trade only considered a last resort? Even on lemmy, I got downvoted to shit when I commented that people should focus less on degrees and more on industry certification, to have some actual value they can sell to potential employers. An electrician certification proves that you can do something. A bachelor's degree is just a checkbox to prove you went through the motions.
Relying on just degrees that virtually everybody else has is stupid. Anon has nothing that stands out from the soup of zero-experience job seekers.
the need for EV automotive mechanics will only grow, id probably do that if I was in the OPs shoes
Because a lot of trades are pretty bad for your health. They require getting in potentially unsafe environments, dealing with substances or byproducts that can lead to cancers or other occupational diseases. They also require a lot more physical work. So of course people would prefer a cushy office job to trawling through crawlspaces lined with asbestos to plug in a light. Not to mention that a lot of trade jobs are not that great paid when starting out, the good pay comes with years of experience and until you get there you have to suffer through all the above. Sure some office jobs don't pay well starting out either but you just sit on your ass in a air conditioned office instead of nailing 2x4s in the hot sun for 8 hours.
People always ask this question but they never consider that there are actual valid considerations that make trade jobs unattractive compared to other jobs.
Edit: Oh also a lot of well paid trade people run their own companies which is an additional stress and a lot of people don't want to deal with that. My father is in trades and he ran his own company and I watched him age 20 years in the span of 5 due to all the stress and physical work he was doing. Running a company, even a small one is no easy job.
The pay part of that equation is dependent on where you are, and what trade you're talking about.
Where I am, trades generally get paid more than any office job you're going to get with just a random bachelors degree. And if you join one of the trade unions, especially one of the higher skilled industrial ones (so like electricians, pipefitters, millwrights, etc, as opposed to general labour or residential construction), your pay will be much higher than entry level office positions, and will likely stay higher than anyone who doesn't get themselves into an upper management type position.
Electricians, pipefitters, and millwrights have really hazardous jobs. That’s why they get paid so well, directly and indirectly (because it takes a lot of training to do those jobs safely).
I’m not trying to discourage anyone from taking these jobs, but they’re not risk free.
Define "really hazardous".
What are the rates of workplace injury for trades compared to the rates of people getting long term health effects caused by sedentary work conditions?
Per 100k full time employees, 1.6, 3.1, and 1.8/year versus 0.8/year for electricians, pipefitters, and millwrights, respectively, vs office workers.
So based on those statistics, I will say that those trades are definitely not "really dangerous". Tortilla manufacturering is twice as dangerous at 6.2, and hospital workers were up above 10. Going from 0.8 to 1.6 is like going from laying on your couch to walking down the sidewalk.
When I started in construction 20 years ago minimum wage was $10, but most trades start at $15, this is for a laborer, apprentices got $18
After 4 years I was 33.50 an hour and still had room to move up. My direct supervisor was making $50, but he had a cash bonus to pay for his truck, instead of them giving him one.
Now minimum wage is $15 and most trades start at $21 and hour.
legally the company is supposed to pay apprentices 60% of the lowest paid journeyman, but they can hire people specifically to lower this -.- fourth years get 90%, it goes up each year. It forces a raise after finishing each schooling section.
Trade jobs frequently require buying a lot of the equipment and protective gear. Most of the high pay examples include a lot of overtime, and may be limited when work isn't available. A lot of trades don't have a regular 40 hour work week, if the weather is bad for a week they may not make any money.
It really depends and is a lot more complex of a comparison. Trades are important and I think they should have more stability and require less personal cost, although most of that would be addressed if we had single payer healthcare and UBI.
Sitting on your arse all day, everyday is equally bad for your health. I'd probably argue even worse, you can't get PPE to help protect you from sedentary working conditions.
Yeah you can. Adequate breaks for eyes, standing desks, under desk elliptical/treadmill, etc... not that most employers will supply or allow it, but it can be overcome.
Wrist braces, chairs that encourage you to sit upright, risers for your monitor, a standing desk, etc...
You can also choose to be active in your time off, or during breaks or while waiting for something to load. If you work a physically demanding trade, no amount of elective sedentary behavior in your free time will compensate for the damage and strain you're putting your body through at work.
Also, this is all without mentioning the fact that some people have disabilities that prevent them from doing many trades.
It’s definitely no where close to worse.
Depends on which trade and location you're comparing with. Things vary wildly in the trades.
Yep..... Certain trades are worse for your bones and joints, but not much is going to be worse for your systemic health than sitting for half the day.
As someone who's worked in construction and now works in orthopedics and rehabilitation, I think the biggest issue with a lot of people in trades like residential construction is that they don't really learn how to prioritize their physical health until a lot of the damage is already done. Once you're a bit older you kinda learn that even if carrying that 80lb bag of cement by yourself is faster, it's still better to take the time to grab a dolly or another person. Most of the issues would be solved if we had better regulations.
The effects of sitting on your arse can be mitigated with 30 to 40 minutes of daily vigorous exercise. There are a bunch of studies showing this. It's not remotely the same thing.
Standing desks to transition from aitting to standing and exercising on breaks is the PPE for office work.
It'd be lovely if the US had more requirements for providing better tools for office workers. I've never had a job be willing to fund anything outside of pointing me at a used desk with a 15 year old computer.
I'm not saying that everyone who doesn't get an office job should immediately become a tradie. When you have nothing else to offer, just having some industry certificates is an advantage. Even if the certificate is unrelated to the job. My first job was assembly machine operator in a factory. My boss straight up told me that he hired me because of my Cisco and ECDL certs that I got in high school (for free because Europe).
If you don't get the office job you wanted, you've still opened up some options. Tradie life isn't glamorous, but it pays better than complaining on an internet forum.
And if you do get a job and it doesn't work out, you'll still have something to fall back on.
Of all the working class, they are often worked the hardest.
I went to electrical school right out of high school and was an electrician for 10 years. Learned a ton of practical skills, can fix just about any household or mechanical issues, and bought my first house 5 years in. Best decision my parents ever encouraged me to do. Would recommend and also not sure why it gets so much flak
What did you end up doing afterwards? I'm interested in becoming an electrician out of interest, for the practical skills, and the fact it seems there would be work wherever I find myself in the future. I just don't want it to be my final stop necessarily. I'm curious what kind of things the trade can lead too.
I actually switched into IT. My commute to work was pretty bad and my brother and friend had a work from home job, so they put in a good word for me, and here I am. Honestly I got pretty lucky with this one as I don't have any schooling for it, but I do pretty well in interviews so I was able to land the job. That was 5 years ago.
I was able to bullshit my way through the interview saying electrical had a lot of transferable skills like troubleshooting problems, working with work computers, plus I do a lot of PC work on my own time as a hobby (which is true) etc etc.
Got my red seal (Canada) so if I ever want to go back into the trade, I can really easily and would be starting again at journeyman wage.
I think electrician will be one of those jobs that will always be in demand, but you might have to go where the work is. I'm from BC and spent my first year working out in Alberta doing a camp job. After that though, 9 years pretty steady at home until I left it on my own terms
An electrician certification doesn't mean a whole lot either. Both are just paper. Degrees with work experience and trades with apprentership time hold a little more value, but its still hit and miss.
Where are you that a trade doesn’t require 4 years of schooling and on the job training?
Most places won’t even let you do the schooling without being indentured and working for a minimum amount either.
They know you need both.
I'm in the US and I never got any formal education in my trade (HVAC-R). Most of the techs here didn't. The few techs we've hired who did go to trade school came out of it with practically no knowledge which couldn't easily be taught on the job in a couple months. It seems like, for HVAC at least, the tradeschool programs teach enough that maybe you could manage some light residential work, but they barely touch on refrigeration, let alone the heavy commercial and industrial refrigeration we often do. When evaluating candidates, a tradeschool cert means less than a year of experience in some sort of maintenance position.
The same seems to be true of many other trades. At least in my state no certs are required or even beneficial to become a licensed plumber or electrician. Those liscenses are all based solely on years of experience. Technically you can become a master electrician solely with an electrical engineering degree and 0 years of experience but if you have that degree then you probably have better jobs available to you.
No certs necessary for locksmithing either.
Australia. And yes, you have to do on the job training, but that doesn't mean anything. The quality of the work experience is highly variable, so you could spend all of it learning, or all of it buying coffee and sweeping floors.
Depends on where you are in the world. Here you have to have a portfolio and working experience among other qualifications before you can take the assessment. You're not an electrician until you're on the register after all that.
Nobody I knew that went to trade school was ever able to get a job doing that trade. Granted, we all graduated during the 2008 crash, and were in a very economically depressed rural area.
Because it's not even an option for most people.
https://hcs.la/life/story/2025-12-18/the-disappearance-of-young-people-in-trades-and-how-the-education-system-is-responsible/
Why is it that you think that an electrician certification is less about checkboxes than a 4-year university degree? Or that the checkboxes are somehow more difficult to game? Most trade schools themselves are a joke, so you have to play the meta game of getting the cert and networking your way to a job. You know, same as your university degree.
The fact is, most trades pay shit, and their big advantage is that you get to start earlier in life, and that you have more opportunities to get overtime pay. That can be a good option for your 20's, especially during a jobs boom (most trades are infamously boom and bust cycles), but by your 30's you will get passed up by most of your degree holding peers (and you'll totally get left in the dust in your 40's and 50's).
It's not good advice to young people. Electricians, plumbers, welders, etc. don't get paid very much on average, and the ones who break out from that low pay are either highly specialized or climb the small business/management ladder (at which point they benefit from concepts taught in school as well).
Where are you that plumbers don’t get paid well? At least where I live, plumbing is the default “I want to make a lot of money and don’t know what to do with my life” recommendation. Most trades people I know, on average, make more money than most office people I know, on average. Office jobs may have a higher ceiling but that doesn’t necessarily mean most people are making more. Cut out the top and bottom extremes in pay and trades are definitely the better route to decent pay cheques, at least where I live.
I'm in the U.S. Here's an interactive, searchable table of U.S. stats for all job codes Note that you can dig around the site by state, as well.
It shows the mean, median, 10th percentile, 25th percentile, 75th percentile, and 90th percentile wage, plus the number in each job, by both hour and by year.
For 47-2152, "Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters," we have 465k people making an average of $72k. The 10th/25th/50th/75th/90th percentiles are $44k/$50k/$63k/$85k/$108k. Those numbers are exactly what I'm talking about: a high floor and a very flat trajectory, where the 75th percentile doesn't even double the 25th percentile.
Compare to something like Human Resources Specialist, one of the more unremarkable college-educated office jobs. They're averaging $82k, with $47k/$59k/$76k/$99k/$129k on those percentiles. And they have a clear pathway towards Human Resources manager, where the average is $164k and the spread is $88k/$111k/$149k/$199k/$268k.
Note also that the U.S. employs almost twice as many HR specialists (912,000) as plumbers (465,000) in our job market. And HR Managers are over 200,000 people.
Start digging into different jobs and you can see a lot of the same trends. Non-college educated white collar jobs (secretaries, assistants) don't pay well, and jobs requiring a bit of a certification but not full blown bachelor's degrees (paralegal) are comparable to plumber incomes.
But my general point is clear: the trades have a high floor, very flat trajectories, and a low ceiling. They deal with higher unemployment rates and the jobs are harder on the bodies. The college educated pathways have a huge up front cost (tuition and late entry into the workforce), and take up to a decade to actually catch up. But most of us work 30-50 year careers, so a 10-year break even point is actually pretty good.
And if you want to work with your hands, the educated blue collar job fields can be super lucrative: field engineers, outdoor researchers, even things like surgeons.
Here too. Our friend's kid went into plumbing, he gets steady well paid work with a company plus under the table jobs at least one per weekend. He's raking it in & happy about it. It is a demanding and often stinky job but very lucrative.
That really depends on the program. A general studies BA from a correspondence school might not indicate much, but a BS in the focus of a highly specialized university does.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a skilled trade.
That said historical opinion on the quality of jobs they offered has lead to lower enrolment. Combined with an aging population has people aging out of the workforce creating demand in the “labour market”.
When the underlying reason to pursue any career is capitalisms incentive structure and you can see those wheels grinding it gives the jump on the bandwagon vibe of suggesting a trade the ick.
From personal experience there are two sides of the trades.
Do well entrepreneurs who earn a good living offering services and exploiting labour as any good capitalist does.
Commodified labour who is paid a “fair wage” for their skills but are generally not benefitting from the systemic demand of their skills beyond that.
It’s fair that the hand we’re dealt gives us a choice between a useless degree and a diploma that offers a job
It’s also fair that game is bullshit lol
Agree, I am 3 years into a bachelor's degree and like 9 months ago I realised I haven't really developed any meaningful skills. I have no idea what job I even could have anymore. I chose to pursue BBA because at the time it seemed like an easy way to get a decent office job, and at the beginning all the teachers assured that i'd find my specialty during the studies. Turns out, I do not want to see money, count money or think about money, I just want a job where I create something, do something. So after i'm done with this shit, I think I'll try to just get a source of income and work on a game or maybe just go to a trade school later
Additionally these days anyone can cheat and get through college knowing damn near nothing. I think trade schools (i think) usually still require in person testing of the hands on skills.