Why the Trades are struggling and who’s to blame?

If you’ve tried to hire anyone for a labor-intensive job lately,... whether it’s construction, plumbing, electrical, or even basic handyman work, then you already know the answer: we’re in a serious labor crisis. Finding skilled, reliable workers is like hunting for gold. And if you're in the trades like I am, you’ve probably been asking the same question: Where did everybody go?

Here’s the hard truth as I see it: we didn’t lose them overnight, we raised them not to show up.

This labor shortage isn’t just a post-pandemic fluke or a generational “lack of work ethic” problem. It goes way deeper than that. This shortage was planted decades ago—back in the 1970s, when I was still in school and it’s been growing ever since. The root of it? The cultural devaluation of skilled trades.

Back then, schools started pushing a message hard: go to college, get a degree, work in an office, and you’ll be set for life. The trades? They were painted as a fallback plan for kids who couldn’t "cut it" academically. Shop class started disappearing. Vocational programs got less funding. And slowly but surely, a stigma grew around blue-collar work.

That message didn’t just come from schools though. It came from parents too.  And that’s where I primarily put the blame.

Parents wanted to see their kids "succeed" and who can blame them? But somewhere along the way, “success” became synonymous with college degrees, fancy titles, and digital careers. If your kid said they wanted to be a plumber or a carpenter, too many parents saw that as settling. They nudged them toward computers, business, finance, social media… anything that didn’t involve getting their hands dirty.

So now we’re sitting here in 2025 with generations of young people who were actively discouraged from learning a trade. We have kids with four-year degrees, drowning in student debt, working retail or stuck in jobs that don't use their education. Meanwhile, we can’t find anyone to frame a house, run electrical, pour concrete, or fix an HVAC system in the middle of summer. We have plenty of people who know how to edit a TikTok video, but hardly anyone who knows how to lay brick.

And the irony? The trades are booming. Wages are solid. The work is steady. Skilled tradespeople are retiring by the thousands, and there aren’t enough young people coming up to replace them. We’ve got more opportunity than people, and it’s only getting worse.

SO WHAT CAN WE DO?

We need to rewrite the story.

We need to tell our kids—and maybe more importantly, show them—that working with your hands is not a second-class option.

That being an electrician, a welder, a mason, a contractor, a mechanic—those are careers you can be proud of. They build the world we live in, literally.

They pay well, offer independence, and provide a path to real financial security without needing a mountain of student loan debt.

We also need schools to bring back vocational training, not as a backup plan, but as a legitimate, respected option. And we need parents to stop discouraging their kids from pursuing trades just because it doesn’t look like what they imagined "success" to be.

This isn’t about blaming for the sake of pointing fingers. It’s about being honest. We created this problem over time, and now we need to actively undo it. That starts with changing the way we talk to the next generation.

Because if we don’t?

There won’t be anyone left to build the houses, fix the plumbing, repair the roads, or keep the lights on.