https://youtu.be/aSOjYNSxR2o
Mike Rowe states in this video that there are about three and a half million jobs available right now and only ten percent require a four year degree. That means ninety percent require technical or trade training or experience, or as he says a willingness to get dirty.
Years ago a boss I had told me there was a shortage of intelligent problem solvers in the work force, blue and white collar. He said there would be an increasing need for men and women who could do something, figure out what needs to be done, and do it without being told how to. I have seen this over and over in my career and personal life.
I know a man who only has a high school education, and to be honest, he hated school and barely graduated. But he is a man who thinks in a very unique way, is fascinated by the world he lives in, and is extremely observant. He is the man who figures out how to make the projects his company builds come alive, and his boss depends on him when architects and engineers have designed something that even they don’t know how to get off the paper. Those kinds of men are dying out. I don’t know what in the world makes them think the way they do, but you cannot teach it in college apparently. I am guessing that it has to do with early lessons learned from his father. This man was introduced to the mechanical world of fix and repair and problem solving as a young boy, by a father who knew how things worked. He is a mechanic, a welder, a pipefitter, an electrician, he is very skilled in hydraulic and pneumatic design, and he supervises high dollar marine construction projects. Aside from learning to weld at a trade school in high school, all these skills are self taught.
It reminds me often of Sharon’s stories from the farm. People learned to do because they had to do. Now they don’t, and we have lost people who actually think. I believe we have a generation of highly educated people who cannot problem solve if it wasn’t taught to them in some class. When they must work under very adverse conditions, when things are not as they were in that lab class at Cal Tech, OMG! They begin to collapse. The few who emerge having thought their way through situations like this will be worth their weight in gold.
When I worked at Home Depot, everyone in the store came to me to figure out how long a board to sell someone who needed a custom step stringer, or how long a pole was needed to hang a light fixture from a cathedral ceiling. In other words, they could not calculate a hypotenuse. We had customers who came in and needed help calculating how much siding they needed. When you asked for dimensions, they would usually tell you how many square feet the house was, and could not understand that the outside walls were not related to the floor square footage. If they wanted to pour a concrete patio or fill an attic with blown insulation, they could not understand why you needed a depth measurement, as well as width and length. In other words, people can’t think.

What are your experiences of finding men and women who have a trade or a skill, problem solvers, people who don’t actually have to be told every step of every job? Is America losing the skills and knowledge, the work ethic, the can do attitude that built our country? Do we have young workers, both white and blue collar, who can get the job done when the chips are down?
Here is one example from CBS 60 Minutes article:
Karl Hutter is the new chief operating officer of Click Bond in Carson City, Nev., a company his parents started in 1969.
Karl Hutter: We’re still technically a small business, but we’re growing quickly.
Byron Pitts: So, you’re hiring?
Karl Hutter: We are hiring. We’re hiring and we need to find good people. And that’s really what the challenge is these days.
Three hundred and twenty-five people work at Click Bond, making fasteners that hold cables, panels and pretty much everything else inside today’s planes, ships and trains. Their customers include the Defense Department. The F-35 has 30,000 Click Bond fasteners.
The workhorses in this factory may look old, but they’re computer controlled machines that make precision parts, accurate to a thousandth of an inch; the thickness of a piece of paper. Click Bond needs employees who can program the computers, operate the machines, fix them and then check to make sure the results are up to spec.
Ryan Costella: If you look at the real significant human achievements in this country a lot of them have to do with manufacturing or making something.
Ryan Costella is head of Strategic Initiatives at Click Bond. That’s another way of saying he’s looking ahead to both opportunities and problems facing the company.
Byron Pitts: Sure. So the skill gap, is it across the board? Is it at all levels? Or is it the entry level?
Ryan Costella: I would honestly say it’s probably an entry level problem. It’s those basic skill sets. Show up on time, you know, read, write, do math, problem solve. I can’t tell you how many people even coming out of higher ed with degrees who can’t put a sentence together without a major grammatical error. It’s a problem. If you can’t do the resume properly to get the job, you can’t come work for us. We’re in the business of making fasteners that hold systems together that protect people in the air when they’re flying. We’re in the business of perfection. .
Costella says Click Bond ran into trouble when it expanded production and went to buy these machines from a factory in Watertown, Conn. The company didn’t have enough skilled labor back home in Nevada to run them, so it bought the entire factory just to get the qualified employees and kept the plant running in Connecticut.