Skilled trades careers are booming, from trade school welding programs to women in skilled trades. William Myers of Ancora Education shares why now's the time.
Host Andrew Brown sits down with welding educator and skilled trades advocate Bill Myers of Ancora Education to explore how to launch a welding career in today’s trades industry.
They dive into the structure of trade school welding programs, how the NCCER Career Builder helps students choose a path, and what it really takes to land high-paying welding career opportunities—whether you’re just starting out or returning to the trades later in life.
Whether you're considering trade school, apprenticeship, or just want honest insight into skilled trades careers, this episode delivers straight talk from an industry veteran who’s been there.
IN THIS EPISODE
(00:02) – The Rise of Skilled Trades Careers in 2025
(06:41) – How Trade School Welding Programs Are Structured
(15:24) – Breaking Down the NCCER Career Builder Tool
(24:10) – The Role of Women in Skilled Trades Today
(36:52) – Welding Career Opportunities After Graduation
(48:33) – Why Soft Skills Matter as Much as Craftsmanship
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Skilled trades careers are not just viable—they're thriving. Students can now enter trades like carpentry, plumbing, HVAC, and electricians roles with real support and structure.
- Trade school welding programs offer an accelerated path (as short as 10 months) into high-paying welding career opportunities in industries like construction and aerospace.
- Tools like the NCCER Career Builder are game changers in helping prospective students match with the right path in the skilled trades industry—and it's available in high school.
- Women in skilled trades are gaining visibility and mentorship, especially through platforms like TikTok and YouTube, helping shift outdated narratives in the trades industry.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Bill Myers (also known as William Myers) is the National Director of Skilled Trades at Ancora Education. With decades of experience as a welder, fabricator, and educator, Bill has shaped modern training standards across trade programs. He's also an active voice on the Skilled Trades Advisory Council, focusing on education, craftsmanship, and career advocacy for tradespeople.
KEYWORDS
Skilled trades careers, Trade school welding programs, Women in skilled trades, Welding career opportunities, NCCER Career Builder, Skilled Trades, Trades Industry, Trades Careers, Education, Apprenticeships, Career Growth, Industry Experts, Craftsmanship, Problem-solving, Creativity, Andrew Brown, Bill Myers, William Myers, Ancora Education, Skilled Trades Advisory Council, Toolfetch, Welding, Carpentry, HVAC, Electricians, Plumbers, Millwrights, Construction, Contractors, Tradespeople, Advocacy
RESOURCE LINKS
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-myers-907503281/
Ancora Education: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ancora-education/
SUPPORT THE SHOW:
If you’re getting value from these episodes and want to help keep the mics on, consider tipping the show here → https://andrewbrowntrades.kit.com/products/toolbox
Every dollar helps us keep bringing unfiltered insights from the trades, straight to your ears.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
They excelled by doing more. And what I mean by that is we had
morning, afternoon and evening classes. So they would take their
class in the morning but stay for the afternoon and
sometimes the evening class so that they could practice more
and more and more and more. And this was back in,
I want to say 2012, those guys got hired
(00:23):
to work out at Palo Verde nuclear power plant at
$2024 an hour right from graduation.
It is possible.
Hi, I'm Andrew Brown. You're listening to the Lost Star of the Skilled Trades
podcast, a show that shines the spotlight on
(00:43):
careers in the skilled trades that are high paying, honorable,
rewarding and fulfilling. The trades are the backbone of the
economy that keep us running and without them, our world
would cease to exist.
Today we have a special guest, Bill Myers of
(01:06):
Encore Education. He is the national director of
Skill Trades. Welcome, Bill, to the show.
Hey, thank you for having me. It is great for you to be on
the show. Career exploration into the trades,
I feel now this is just my opinion, I feel is difficult. You
have so many different paths that you can take. Welding,
(01:27):
carpentry, plumbing, electrical, diesel, mechanic, H Vac.
It's just almost feel that it's endless. But some kids
don't have the resources to learn
and to speak to the right people, so they just give up. How does
Ancora education help students find their passion in the
trades? A couple ways that we do that, Number one is we
(01:49):
direct them to a website. Other than automotive and diesel.
All of our other trades are secondary accredited
through the nccer, the National Construction of Education and
Research. And what they've come up with was a
online kind of questionnaire for
somebody that wanted to get into trades. So you can start doing
(02:11):
this in high school, you can go onto that website and
answer a couple pages of questions. And what that's going
to do is give that prospective student a better
understanding of what trade that person may want to go
in. It's called Career Builder. You can find it on
nccer.org and a few other places. But it's a
(02:34):
good way for them to start. I know when I went to trade school it
was still a high school setting, you know, which they did
away with, which was a huge mistake. But your freshman
year you picked a trade, but you had to take
two other trades because you didn't know. You know, like
all young adults, you don't really know what trade you want to go into.
(02:56):
And when I first picked, I picked something totally different
than what I ended up doing. So I started out doing drafting
and by the Time my freshman year was over, I picked welding
to further, you know, that trade career while I was in high school.
You know, you talked about the assessment tool and the career builder.
The kids that are coming in, is there anyone who to
(03:19):
speak to a little bit further about? So let's say they
take the career builder and they find, I don't know, plumbing is
sort of their chosen path. If they don't have anybody
in their network to speak to, like there's nobody
friend related, family related, there's no neighbors, anybody,
what can they do to find out more information now that they know that
(03:42):
they want to be a plumber? I can't speak for any other
schools, but our schools will take you in, give you a
tour and tell you about what all is involved in
the plumbing program, job opportunities, you know, and
everything else. And if you decide, hey, that's not what I want to
do. You know, all of our campuses have more than one trade program
(04:04):
running at that campus. So, you know, hey, can I talk about
electrical or can I go talk about H Vac? And they will
show them that particular trade and what that trade
encompasses and the job prospects for those trades.
So it's not just a, hey, I'm going to show up and only talk about
plumbing if that student says, well, I heard a lot about
(04:26):
plumbing and I don't think I really want to do that. But I did see
that H vac lab over there and that looked interesting. Can I talk about
that? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So there's more than one
option at every one of our trade schools. And the kids that are coming
in, what's sort of the breakdown? What are you seeing?
Women wise come in percentage wise versus men that are
(04:47):
interested in the trade. So we see
about 10% women, usually the biggest
majority. It's spread across all the trades. But you see a
lot of them in electrical. I see a lot of women in H Vac.
I see women in welding, and I see women in diesel, heavy
truck, and automotive, you know, so it's not just one
(05:10):
trade that they're picking to go to. You see them across the wide
variety of trades. And we've even hired instructors that
are women that have been in the trade for a while that come in
and go, hey, you know what, I want to be an instructor now.
You know, they do very well. So, you know, there's always been a push for
women in the workforce, and now I think they're actually starting to
(05:32):
get into the trades a lot more. I do see that, that
women are getting into the trades More. And I believe it's only about 3 or
4%. And, you know, people say different percentages, but I believe it's a low.
It's a low percentage. I do see the difference
being women seeing other women on social media. And what I mean
by that is that you have women in welding,
(05:55):
electrical, carpentry, all different trades, plumbing.
They're showing what it's like a day in the life using your
hands. And I've spoken to many different women in different trades, but when you
see them out there on social media, whether on TikTok or
YouTube or LinkedIn, depending on which channel that you're on, I do
feel that it has an influence over somebody who's thinking
(06:18):
about working with their hand is a woman doesn't really know much
about it, but they see this individual doing this type of work. Do you think
that social media has helped women be a little
bit more comfortable to see other women doing it out there? Oh, it
absolutely hasn't hurt, you know, I mean, because I've seen the
TikTok videos of the women that are, you know, in the trades
(06:40):
talking about the trades, you know, bricklayers to diesel
techs to welders. And, you know, I know for a fact that
that's probably help some. But the other thing that helps is coming
from a family of people in the trade. When I was
growing up, if you were a daughter of my father, he didn't have any
daughters, but if you were a daughter of my dad, he would have definitely
(07:01):
steered you clear so far away from a trade that it wasn't even
funny. But now that dynamic has shifted and,
you know, parents are now more open to, to their kids going
out and doing something. Not just because, you
know, it's, you know, you got to get a college degree and I want you
to do this and I want you to do that. But they want their kids
(07:23):
to go out and do something that makes good money but also makes them happy.
And I think that shift is what helped a lot. If you can
kind of go back into the way you mentioned that you were doing
welding, was there truly anybody in your circle
in the trades at that point, or did you just say, I want to work
with my hands? And this welding thing seems like it's for me.
(07:45):
How did that journey happen for you? Well, my dad
was a tool and die maker. So you're already in
with a family and you're in a
neighborhood with all people that are in trades,
because trades didn't pay what they do now. By no
means. So you were in that middle class neighborhood with
(08:07):
all the little houses next to each other. And there were more than one
person in that neighborhood in the trades because that's just how
it was back then. And he was a tool and die maker
and he wanted his kids to go to college. That just wasn't for
me. By the time I got to high school, I had enough of school.
So I went to a high school that was in my school
(08:30):
district that was nothing but trades. And
to tell you how bad it was having, you know, women
segregated from guys, there was a school on one side of the
street that was for the women and a school on the other side of the
street that was for men. And that's where they taught trades and
on the other side they taught cosmetology, cooking,
(08:51):
baking, you know, stuff that was traditionally,
back then, a woman's role, you know, and it was like, why
aren't any of these women over here learning how to weld, Learning how to do
this? Learning, learning. Oh, we don't have that. We have this school over here. And
it was a little, you know, off putting at first, but I knew
I wasn't going to go to college. That wasn't my
(09:14):
path. So that was what the regular
high schools in my area taught was, here's what
you need to do to get to college. Well, I had no intention of
doing that. So when I signed up for that school, they gave you a little
aptitude test. They made sure that you were going to fit in
with, you know, taking a trades course. And then when I
(09:36):
picked drafting, they said, okay, but on your freshman year you're going to take
drafting for a third, you're going to take machine shop for a
third, and then you're going to take welding for a third. And at the end
of your freshman season, you pick which one of those you're going
to go into for the rest of the time you're in high school because you
went to high school for the academia part one week.
(09:57):
The other week you spent that whole week in high school in that trade.
Things were a lot different back then. I also do feel that shop class
was more readily available, that kids went through a shop class. I don't even
remember really shop class being in my high
school. So I graduated in, I have to think for a
quick second. I graduated in 96 out of high
(10:20):
school. I don't recall any, you know, trades or
shop class of any sort. And I, I get this more and more as I,
I speak to more and more people around the country. Some schools have It a
lot of schools don't, but these kids are not exposed to working
with their hands. So even if somebody has that technical spar, the mechanical
ability, sometimes they even get bypassed because when they go to sit
(10:42):
down with a guidance counselor, they might not be supported in that
they want to go a blue collar, you know, path.
Because the only thing that a guidance counselor maybe sees is just what college
are you going to? I don't know if that's changing a little bit because of
social media, because of a lot of articles in the Wall Street Journal that
we've seen about blue collar and the opportunities that it's
(11:04):
starting to change. Kids are starting to look at college or four year
college degree that you're going to spend six figures. What's the
real return on that? I remember going to school, to be honest with you.
I say this all the time. I went to University of Rhode island for four
years, studied business, programming, finance,
came out more confused out of school than I was in school and lost.
(11:27):
A lot of people have that journey. If you can go back in time.
And a lot of people say this, that I went into something I just wasn't
interested in. But if you can go back before school and make that decision to
say, you know what, maybe it pays to learn a trade, work
with your hands. Because I could take that in many different paths.
And I think that's a great option for someone today is just not feeling that
(11:48):
college is right for you. Like you said, college wasn't right for you, right?
It wasn't. And I knew that, you know, going into, you
know, that trade program. But what really messed everything up
was everybody that wanted their kids to
do better than them. They couldn't see that sometime
in the future those trades that those students would
(12:11):
learn would end up being a lucrative living for them.
You know, they thought, well, if you're going to be a plumber or you're going
to be this or you're going to be that, that was beaten down like you
weren't a productive member of society. Almost.
I'll date myself. But I graduated high school in 1977.
When I finished my junior year, the whole curriculum for
(12:32):
welding I had learned. After I graduated my junior
year, my senior year, they had a job program
where, hey, I no longer had to go to that welding
class anymore. I went out and worked. So I was
working in the field of welding at 17, before I graduated
high school. And if you look at things now, it's hard for
(12:55):
students that don't have a high school or diploma to
Even go to a school and learn a trade. We've put so many
restrictions on things with all the bureaucracy that
those students don't even get a chance to go to school. They can't
get any title for funding. You know, they can't do anything
to better themselves. They're stuck, you know, and that's what
(13:17):
we need to fix. And I think if we fixed it back at the high
school area, it would be a lot better than waiting
until after they graduated or dropped out to try to get
these students in a program. Because what we've did at our
schools is we have a high school where they can
finish high school so that they can go to a trade program. They
(13:39):
don't have to go to one of ours. It's just an opportunity
for those people because high school graduation rates have
been dropping, and it's a way for them to be able to graduate
high school with an accredited high school, not a
ged. They get an actual high school diploma and be able to
go out and do whatever it is they wanted to do.
(14:01):
That that high school diploma barrier was stopping them from to do,
you know, and there's all kinds of reasons people can't, you know,
finish high school. Whether it's personal, whether it's, you know,
language or education, or sometimes it's a financial barrier for
their family that that person has to go out to work. But
I started welding before I finished high school. I don't know why anybody else
(14:23):
couldn't. But the nice thing about the NCCER is they partnered up
with and have a build your future initiative where
these people are going to high schools and talking to seniors
about the benefits of trade programs before they graduate
now. So I think that helps a lot too. You
mentioned a couple times, the nccer. I had Boyd Worsham on the
(14:47):
podcast, the president of the organization, and
he just did a. An outstanding job, you know, really explaining what
the organization is doing and, you know, how they go about
it. So you're just kind of reinforcing. Exactly kind of what they do,
you know, Some of these statistics out there, I follow
on the welding side. Welding workforce data.com that's put out by
(15:09):
the American Welding Society. And the latest Data says
by 2029, we need
320,500 welders by
2029, which is about 80,000
welders every single year to make up that gap, on top
of 157,000
welders retiring. Also, they state that the median wage
(15:32):
is about $26.76 now. That's they
say that's the median wage or 55,000. Talk to
me a little bit about, let's say, if you go to Encore education
and you go through the welding program, for people that are listening,
how long is the program people going to ask, when can
I start making money? When does that happen and what can I expect?
(15:55):
Every program is about 10 months long. Depends on the,
you know, when you fall in into the category of
are you going to have, you know, that week off during July
and that two weeks off at Christmas. It's roughly 10 months
again. And I don't know if Boyd touched on, you know, their actual
curriculum or not, but every curriculum that we use
(16:18):
from them is four levels of
welding, electrical, plumbing or whatever it is. It is a registered
apprenticeship program. We are not an apprenticeship school
because that day go to school for a couple hours and then go to work
the rest of the time. But we do have labs that replicate
what those students will be welding on out in the field.
(16:41):
We start trying to look for jobs for these students about 30
days before graduation. You don't want to get too carried away because,
you know, then you start having the life and job mix and they end up
not graduating from the program, but at about the
30 days, you know, their last few weeks
of the class, they're out there looking for jobs, they're
(17:04):
out there applying for jobs, they're taking weld tests. If it's only
10 months that you're a part of this program, that's not a big
investment of time. If you think about it over a course of like dedicating
four years to college. Right. And spending all that money. So after
the 10 month mark, you said that you can get a
job with local welding shops or local
(17:26):
companies. Is that directly through Encore that
they set that up because of the relationships. We have
a career services division that helps students with
going out on an interview, writing a resume if they need
one, doing all of the steps that needs to be taken, you know,
for that student to just interview and then, hey,
(17:48):
here's a list of jobs. Here's some places we're going to send you to go,
you know, and again, it depends on where
the location is as to where the pay is. And we don't
ever talk about pay, but they do make good money.
They just don't make that $26 an hour yet. Now,
we have a lot of schools in Texas and those people, you know, that's the
(18:11):
heart of the oil field, they're going to do better, but it doesn't mean that
A student that's taking a class in Arizona can't move to
Texas. It doesn't mean anybody can't move anywhere.
Every program that's taught is taught the same at every school. In
your opinion. I mean, everybody's situation is different. I'm just
thinking what people say online because I'm very active on social media and
(18:33):
TikTok and I, you know, I always look at the comments and people who say,
like, and I'm just using welding as an example. You can't make money
in welding. And then someone comes out and says, no, no, no, I'm making,
you know, 100 plus in welding
after x amount of years. But then it comes down to
location. And then there's a lot of people who say, like, I can't get up
(18:54):
and move. And this is my situation. I can't make enough money.
Well, what do I do here? And, you know, would
you recommend somebody say, you're going to have to unfortunately
go where the work is and where the money is, or you just,
you know, you stay put where you are, and then you're going to have to
kind of figure something out, you know, to get to the level you want to
(19:15):
get to. Like, what would you say to someone like that? Because there's a lot
of that out there, a lot of pushback. If somebody's saying they're
not making enough money in welding, they haven't put the time and
effort in to be a good welder. I caught welding for five years
before I started doing this. So welding's my trade. And
I told them, I said I was making
(19:36):
$80,000 a year in the 80s and I
didn't move. I lived in Ohio. There was no pipeline
running through. There were no, you know, refineries or anything like that.
But you have to go find that work. I said, there are people
that run from shutdown to shutdown and make a good
living for six to eight months, and then they take three or four months
(19:58):
off because they made their year's worth of money in that
amount of time. But you have to be up here.
You can't be the welder down here. So improve your
skills. We tell our graduates, once you graduate,
that doesn't mean you can stop coming here. You can come here
and practice. You can come here and ask for a different lead. If
(20:20):
that lead and that job isn't panning out, ask career
services to send you somewhere else. Go out there and learn a different
technique, figure out what it is and what they want,
and then skill yourself to that job. But if
you just sit there and do the same thing over and over and over again,
then you won't improve. You have to diversify and
(20:43):
make sure that you're finding out what that area has
as far as job offerings and make sure you practice those kind
of job offerings. I said there's aerospace jobs all over the
place. Come back and practice that welt. Come back and
practice that. Whatever the material is. There's all
kind of things you can do to upskill yourself because once you
(21:05):
graduate, you can keep coming back here. I just had someone on
the podcast who's in welding and he's the aerospace sector
and they just put a satellite on the moon and he was one of
the people who did the welding of the spacecraft. I mean,
he's in a unique situation and he's doing extremely well. So
sometimes, yeah, you have to go to where the work is. I've even
(21:28):
spoken to welders. Sometimes they have a couple of different jobs, you know, in order
to get to a certain point, money wise,
that you have to level up your skills, you know, get another
certification, maybe go where the work is, maybe the place that you're at,
maybe you've hit a ceiling and you need to move on from there. It really
kind of depends, but it's up to you to do that. And sometimes you just
(21:49):
gotta be, I would say, a little bit assertive. And you gotta go,
you know, to the places where the work is. And sometimes you
got to get in front of people. You have to show them that you show
up on time. These are the soft skills. Forget about the technical skills, just
showing up on time, not being on your phone, just the basic things that
maybe you and I know. But to the younger generation, sometimes
(22:11):
that's not sort of baked in of what they know. Those are the things that
employers really look for. You know, we get feedback from our employers
all the time, and one of the things that they talk about the most
is making sure these people show up on time. And I
go, you can't teach that. You know, I can stand up here and say,
hey, this employer is going to want you to show up on time every day.
(22:33):
If he asks you to work overtime, he's going to want you to work overtime.
But you can't teach that. That person has to either want to do
that or he's not going to want to do that. And that's where I think
you're hearing some of those online stories about,
oh, I do, I work in welding, but I don't make any good money. Well,
that person. You know, as soon as I hear that, it's like
(22:55):
if you're not making good money in the welding field or any other trade
field, you're not a good employee. There are good and bad
employees. I keep telling them, I said, you will, but you
have to change your habits, too. It's not just them.
It's not just them. And you have to, you know,
learn and evolve and get better. It's really up to you. And
(23:18):
it's what you put in is literally what you're going to get
out. How have you seen the technology evolve
over time because of the shortage? And, you know, you look at
cobot welding and you look at different things that they're trying to do to kind
of combat the shortage in the welding side is that opened up
more opportunity for people, kids who are interested in
(23:40):
the gamification side, that, you know, they can run these
cobot machines and use sort of like iPads and that type of stuff,
you know, versus just the standard, you know, welding jobs
that are out there. Yeah, I know what you mean. But the problem with that
is there's only certain amount of things that that can be done on. You
know, there's the repetitive piece that's going to get welded
(24:03):
over and over and over again the same way, and somebody's going to make a
thousand of them. If that robot took my job that I was
doing, that did that, I would be thanking the robot because nobody
wants to sit there for eight hours and weld the same piece over and over
and over again, day in and day out. I said, that's not
how I learned to weld. That's not how. The first company
(24:24):
that I worked for for 20 years, that's not what we did there. We
built things from scratch. So you weren't a welder, you
were a welder fabricator. You had to know how to run a
shear, how to run a brake press, and I didn't know how to
do any of that when I got there. But if you pay attention and you
work with those people, you'll learn to do all that stuff, which
(24:46):
will then make you more valuable to that company. When
kids are going through the actual programs itself, you're
obviously going through with other people who are going through the program, but do they
have any mentorship or people that have sort of been in the
industry for quite a while? I mean, obviously you have the teachers itself, but
is there anybody that you put people in touch with to
(25:08):
speak to about what the future could be within
welding or any type of trade that they're going through.
All right, so that's a good question. So we have a pack meeting
which is the people that are
prospective hires of our students, people in the industry
that come and look at, you know, the curriculum and the labs and,
(25:30):
you know, hey, make recommendations. Do we need this, do we need
that? What do you think? You know, and those people that
come in that are people that are going to employ our students,
we get them to come in as guest speakers to talk to our students
and go, hey, I want you to come in and talk to our students for
an hour on, you know, Thursday night at 6 or 7 o'
(25:52):
clock. Because I'm not going to try to ask them to come during their work
day. A lot of them will come in and I go, all I want you
to do is talk to them about what the expectation
is when they come to work for you or come to work for
you, or come to work for you. Because they need to hear it from
the people that are actually going to employ them. I can sit up
(26:14):
there and preach all day, but if they start hearing it from the people that
are going to employ them, maybe that will make a difference in how
they look at things. You're seeing it sort of firsthand and what you're
going to be, what do employers have to do today because
it is competitive to find a good welder has
options, is it based upon
(26:35):
pay? And that's it. And that's how to get the person to come to your
company. What are you seeing? Why certain people will go to
one company over another handing these trades.
It's not like before where, you know, people would jump ship for 25
cents an hour. I mean, I remember that happening in the 80s a lot,
but now it's more about, that's this generational group
(26:57):
is what are my days off? You know, when do I
get my days off, when do I get vacation? What are the
benefits? I'm going to start a family. So things like that are important.
But the also the other important part of that is
how long have you been in business? Are you going to be in business
for the next 10 years or 15 years? What are you going
(27:20):
to upskill me with when I come to work for you? I might not know
how to do something. Are you going to train me to do that? So those
are things a lot of our students are looking for from employers.
On the other side of that, employers are always looking for students
that know how to do exactly what they do. And I'm
like, we teach a well rounded welding program you know, from
(27:42):
gmaw, gtaw, smaw,
fcaw. But your welding and
your process might be something they're not accustomed to. Are you
willing to, you know, take the time to train them to do
stuff like that? You know, the employer side always wants somebody that
I want him to be able to come in and start that job right away.
(28:04):
We're teaching them how to weld on 7 inch long plates. Is
that all you do is make one 7 inch long weld with one restart? And
it's like, well, no, we don't do that. We. I go, well, then you're going
to have to show them how to do that. We can't replicate
every single well that's out there. Well, to your point. And
again, I'm just using social media. A lot of kids
(28:26):
say, yeah, I have this skill, but there's nobody hiring
somebody with no experience. So if you don't have any experience, how do you get
the job? What do you do in that case? And again,
that's back to the employer. The employers are complaining that,
well, we don't have enough people, we don't have enough people. And then
we're sending them people with, you know, hey, they've never had a job
(28:48):
in welding. They've had 10 months of welding school. They haven't
had a job in welding. Oh, I don't want that person. I want the person
that can come in and start doing the job right away and it's like,
well, good luck finding them. So it's on both sides there. At
some point that has to come together and those
employers got to realize that, okay, wait a minute,
(29:10):
we're going to have to start hiring these people. And some
employers have already embraced that. The ones that don't are
the ones that are going to fall behind and eventually go out of business because
they can't find anybody. Unfortunately, that's what's going to happen.
It's just interesting to hear both sides, but there's a reason why both sides are
feeling this way. Do you have any success stories
(29:31):
that kind of pop up in your mind of any of the trades or anybody
has come through the program who has really excelled up
over the handful of years that you could share with us?
Of course, now I'm not at the campus anymore, but I know when
I was working at the campus there were four or five students
that they excelled by doing more. And what I mean by
(29:54):
that is we had morning, afternoon and evening classes.
So they would take their class in the morning, but stay for
the afternoon and sometimes the evening class. So that they
could practice more and more and more and more. And
this was back in, I want to say, 2012,
those guys got hired to work out at Palo Verde
(30:17):
nuclear power plant at 20, $24 an hour right from
graduation. It is possible, but you have to be
able to make that commitment. I get it. A lot of students can't
make that commitment because of family already having
work obligations. And that's why they come to night school. They're
trying to work during the day, come to school at night to better themselves.
(30:39):
So I get everybody can't do that. But the more that you can
come and practice, the better you'll be and the more that person
will likely hire you and pay you more. And I'm sure you
can always tell the ones that are a step above the others in the
work they do. And if you couple that with the soft skills and you'd
get hopefully a good job, you know, a full career, hopefully from that
(31:02):
organization that can, you know, take you
long term, career wise. Well, even some of those guys
weren't the best welders that I've ever seen at that school. When you
go back to that soft skills part where they showed up every
day, they were on time every day, they had that great attitude
that every employer is looking for. That's what separated them
(31:24):
from the guys that were a little bit better welders but didn't have that
attitude, I'll say. It again, is what you put in is what you're going to
get out. And the opportunities, I think over the next handful of years,
40% retiring and all these different trades that you really
have an opportunity to learn a trade that's an always in
demand. And there's tons of companies out there that are looking for
(31:46):
great individuals that have a good skill set. Again, coupling it with
the soft skills, I think you can do extremely, extremely well in the
trades industry.
Now, the tools of the trade. Bill, this
was an amazing conversation, but in every episode, we
always ask our guests a tools of the trade.
(32:10):
What's one piece of career advice you can
give someone, let's say entering the trades that you
wish you knew when you started out? Okay, when I first
started, I did not know to see what
everyone else was doing and how it was being done. If you
want to, you know, really elevate what you're doing,
(32:32):
watch the other people that have been doing it longer than you, it
will shoot up and you'll get these light bulbs they
say going off in your head going, oh, my goodness, I never
knew this could be done like this or like that or you know,
I didn't know I could learn how to do this and get more money.
So watch what everyone else that has been working there for a
(32:54):
while is doing and how they're doing it. And it will elevate your
skills by a lot. You can reinvent the wheel, but there are people
who've already gone down that path who are successful, get around those people, get around
good people that have a good mindset, that have good skills, that have
good soft skills and that's who you want to be around because
they want to succeed. It's going to rub off on you. So I think that's
(33:16):
sort of great of rights across the board. If people want to find
out more about Ancora education, a little bit more about
anything social related on your end, where would they go to find that?
Ancora.com you know, they can find so much about
our schools, so much about where the locations are.
You can even find them on our schools are listed on the
(33:38):
NCCR website. I suggest they go look at the
NCCR website and see what they're all about so that they
know what they're getting into. Because just because we have
hybrid programs in the trades, that's just meaning you're doing
your reading and your book work. So to say
on your time at home. The trade off is you don't have to come to
(34:00):
school to do that book work. When you come to school you're going
into the lab environment, you're going to learn what you read about.
So if I read about oxy fuel cutting, when I come to school the
next day I'm going to go do oxy fuel cutting.
So you know, learn about what trade and definitely go to
that career builder and fill out it and see what it's all about
(34:24):
and just talk to a lot of people that are in that particular
trade. It'll give you a lot of insight on what trade you may
want to go in in the future. Like you said, the boomers are
retiring at an alarming rate and that was the largest
generation of people. You know, the next group of people
was the Gen Xers. Well, the Gen Xers are already out there working.
(34:46):
You know, if they're not in a trade, they're not going to be, you know,
getting replaced anytime soon. But you gen zers get out there
and you know there's a lot of opportunities because those
boomers that traditionally did all those trade jobs
are actually retiring a lot every year. Bill,
this has been great advice across the board thank you for being on the
(35:08):
show today. Hey, thank you for inviting me. It was good. I liked it.
And thank you to our listeners. If you want more valuable insights and trades
related information, head over to andrewbrown.net and join our
Trades Movement newsletter where we advocate for the trades, share
inspirational stories, provide resources, and you join a
passionate trades community. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast
(35:30):
so you never miss another episode. We'll see you next time.
Thanks for listening to the Lost Art of the Skilled Trades. Visit
us@AndrewBrown.net for more resources and tips.
Join us next time for real stories and meaningful initiatives
as we celebrate our men and women in the skilled trades and shape
(35:52):
the future together.
They excelled by doing more. And what I mean by that is we had
morning, afternoon and evening classes. So they would take their
class in the morning but stay for the afternoon and
sometimes the evening class so that they could practice more
and more and more and more. And this was back in,
I want to say 2012, those guys got hired
(00:23):
to work out at Palo Verde nuclear power plant at
$2024 an hour right from graduation.
It is possible.
Hi, I'm Andrew Brown. You're listening to the Lost Star of the Skilled Trades
podcast, a show that shines the spotlight on
(00:43):
careers in the skilled trades that are high paying, honorable,
rewarding and fulfilling. The trades are the backbone of the
economy that keep us running and without them, our world
would cease to exist.
Today we have a special guest, Bill Myers of
(01:06):
Encore Education. He is the national director of
Skill Trades. Welcome, Bill, to the show.
Hey, thank you for having me. It is great for you to be on
the show. Career exploration into the trades,
I feel now this is just my opinion, I feel is difficult. You
have so many different paths that you can take. Welding,
(01:27):
carpentry, plumbing, electrical, diesel, mechanic, H Vac.
It's just almost feel that it's endless. But some kids
don't have the resources to learn
and to speak to the right people, so they just give up. How does
Ancora education help students find their passion in the
trades? A couple ways that we do that, Number one is we
(01:49):
direct them to a website. Other than automotive and diesel.
All of our other trades are secondary accredited
through the nccer, the National Construction of Education and
Research. And what they've come up with was a
online kind of questionnaire for
somebody that wanted to get into trades. So you can start doing
(02:11):
this in high school, you can go onto that website and
answer a couple pages of questions. And what that's going
to do is give that prospective student a better
understanding of what trade that person may want to go
in. It's called Career Builder. You can find it on
nccer.org and a few other places. But it's a
(02:34):
good way for them to start. I know when I went to trade school it
was still a high school setting, you know, which they did
away with, which was a huge mistake. But your freshman
year you picked a trade, but you had to take
two other trades because you didn't know. You know, like
all young adults, you don't really know what trade you want to go into.
(02:56):
And when I first picked, I picked something totally different
than what I ended up doing. So I started out doing drafting
and by the Time my freshman year was over, I picked welding
to further, you know, that trade career while I was in high school.
You know, you talked about the assessment tool and the career builder.
The kids that are coming in, is there anyone who to
(03:19):
speak to a little bit further about? So let's say they
take the career builder and they find, I don't know, plumbing is
sort of their chosen path. If they don't have anybody
in their network to speak to, like there's nobody
friend related, family related, there's no neighbors, anybody,
what can they do to find out more information now that they know that
(03:42):
they want to be a plumber? I can't speak for any other
schools, but our schools will take you in, give you a
tour and tell you about what all is involved in
the plumbing program, job opportunities, you know, and
everything else. And if you decide, hey, that's not what I want to
do. You know, all of our campuses have more than one trade program
(04:04):
running at that campus. So, you know, hey, can I talk about
electrical or can I go talk about H Vac? And they will
show them that particular trade and what that trade
encompasses and the job prospects for those trades.
So it's not just a, hey, I'm going to show up and only talk about
plumbing if that student says, well, I heard a lot about
(04:26):
plumbing and I don't think I really want to do that. But I did see
that H vac lab over there and that looked interesting. Can I talk about
that? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So there's more than one
option at every one of our trade schools. And the kids that are coming
in, what's sort of the breakdown? What are you seeing?
Women wise come in percentage wise versus men that are
(04:47):
interested in the trade. So we see
about 10% women, usually the biggest
majority. It's spread across all the trades. But you see a
lot of them in electrical. I see a lot of women in H Vac.
I see women in welding, and I see women in diesel, heavy
truck, and automotive, you know, so it's not just one
(05:10):
trade that they're picking to go to. You see them across the wide
variety of trades. And we've even hired instructors that
are women that have been in the trade for a while that come in
and go, hey, you know what, I want to be an instructor now.
You know, they do very well. So, you know, there's always been a push for
women in the workforce, and now I think they're actually starting to
(05:32):
get into the trades a lot more. I do see that, that
women are getting into the trades More. And I believe it's only about 3 or
4%. And, you know, people say different percentages, but I believe it's a low.
It's a low percentage. I do see the difference
being women seeing other women on social media. And what I mean
by that is that you have women in welding,
(05:55):
electrical, carpentry, all different trades, plumbing.
They're showing what it's like a day in the life using your
hands. And I've spoken to many different women in different trades, but when you
see them out there on social media, whether on TikTok or
YouTube or LinkedIn, depending on which channel that you're on, I do
feel that it has an influence over somebody who's thinking
(06:18):
about working with their hand is a woman doesn't really know much
about it, but they see this individual doing this type of work. Do you think
that social media has helped women be a little
bit more comfortable to see other women doing it out there? Oh, it
absolutely hasn't hurt, you know, I mean, because I've seen the
TikTok videos of the women that are, you know, in the trades
(06:40):
talking about the trades, you know, bricklayers to diesel
techs to welders. And, you know, I know for a fact that
that's probably help some. But the other thing that helps is coming
from a family of people in the trade. When I was
growing up, if you were a daughter of my father, he didn't have any
daughters, but if you were a daughter of my dad, he would have definitely
(07:01):
steered you clear so far away from a trade that it wasn't even
funny. But now that dynamic has shifted and,
you know, parents are now more open to, to their kids going
out and doing something. Not just because, you
know, it's, you know, you got to get a college degree and I want you
to do this and I want you to do that. But they want their kids
(07:23):
to go out and do something that makes good money but also makes them happy.
And I think that shift is what helped a lot. If you can
kind of go back into the way you mentioned that you were doing
welding, was there truly anybody in your circle
in the trades at that point, or did you just say, I want to work
with my hands? And this welding thing seems like it's for me.
(07:45):
How did that journey happen for you? Well, my dad
was a tool and die maker. So you're already in
with a family and you're in a
neighborhood with all people that are in trades,
because trades didn't pay what they do now. By no
means. So you were in that middle class neighborhood with
(08:07):
all the little houses next to each other. And there were more than one
person in that neighborhood in the trades because that's just how
it was back then. And he was a tool and die maker
and he wanted his kids to go to college. That just wasn't for
me. By the time I got to high school, I had enough of school.
So I went to a high school that was in my school
(08:30):
district that was nothing but trades. And
to tell you how bad it was having, you know, women
segregated from guys, there was a school on one side of the
street that was for the women and a school on the other side of the
street that was for men. And that's where they taught trades and
on the other side they taught cosmetology, cooking,
(08:51):
baking, you know, stuff that was traditionally,
back then, a woman's role, you know, and it was like, why
aren't any of these women over here learning how to weld, Learning how to do
this? Learning, learning. Oh, we don't have that. We have this school over here. And
it was a little, you know, off putting at first, but I knew
I wasn't going to go to college. That wasn't my
(09:14):
path. So that was what the regular
high schools in my area taught was, here's what
you need to do to get to college. Well, I had no intention of
doing that. So when I signed up for that school, they gave you a little
aptitude test. They made sure that you were going to fit in
with, you know, taking a trades course. And then when I
(09:36):
picked drafting, they said, okay, but on your freshman year you're going to take
drafting for a third, you're going to take machine shop for a
third, and then you're going to take welding for a third. And at the end
of your freshman season, you pick which one of those you're going
to go into for the rest of the time you're in high school because you
went to high school for the academia part one week.
(09:57):
The other week you spent that whole week in high school in that trade.
Things were a lot different back then. I also do feel that shop class
was more readily available, that kids went through a shop class. I don't even
remember really shop class being in my high
school. So I graduated in, I have to think for a
quick second. I graduated in 96 out of high
(10:20):
school. I don't recall any, you know, trades or
shop class of any sort. And I, I get this more and more as I,
I speak to more and more people around the country. Some schools have It a
lot of schools don't, but these kids are not exposed to working
with their hands. So even if somebody has that technical spar, the mechanical
ability, sometimes they even get bypassed because when they go to sit
(10:42):
down with a guidance counselor, they might not be supported in that
they want to go a blue collar, you know, path.
Because the only thing that a guidance counselor maybe sees is just what college
are you going to? I don't know if that's changing a little bit because of
social media, because of a lot of articles in the Wall Street Journal that
we've seen about blue collar and the opportunities that it's
(11:04):
starting to change. Kids are starting to look at college or four year
college degree that you're going to spend six figures. What's the
real return on that? I remember going to school, to be honest with you.
I say this all the time. I went to University of Rhode island for four
years, studied business, programming, finance,
came out more confused out of school than I was in school and lost.
(11:27):
A lot of people have that journey. If you can go back in time.
And a lot of people say this, that I went into something I just wasn't
interested in. But if you can go back before school and make that decision to
say, you know what, maybe it pays to learn a trade, work
with your hands. Because I could take that in many different paths.
And I think that's a great option for someone today is just not feeling that
(11:48):
college is right for you. Like you said, college wasn't right for you, right?
It wasn't. And I knew that, you know, going into, you
know, that trade program. But what really messed everything up
was everybody that wanted their kids to
do better than them. They couldn't see that sometime
in the future those trades that those students would
(12:11):
learn would end up being a lucrative living for them.
You know, they thought, well, if you're going to be a plumber or you're going
to be this or you're going to be that, that was beaten down like you
weren't a productive member of society. Almost.
I'll date myself. But I graduated high school in 1977.
When I finished my junior year, the whole curriculum for
(12:32):
welding I had learned. After I graduated my junior
year, my senior year, they had a job program
where, hey, I no longer had to go to that welding
class anymore. I went out and worked. So I was
working in the field of welding at 17, before I graduated
high school. And if you look at things now, it's hard for
(12:55):
students that don't have a high school or diploma to
Even go to a school and learn a trade. We've put so many
restrictions on things with all the bureaucracy that
those students don't even get a chance to go to school. They can't
get any title for funding. You know, they can't do anything
to better themselves. They're stuck, you know, and that's what
(13:17):
we need to fix. And I think if we fixed it back at the high
school area, it would be a lot better than waiting
until after they graduated or dropped out to try to get
these students in a program. Because what we've did at our
schools is we have a high school where they can
finish high school so that they can go to a trade program. They
(13:39):
don't have to go to one of ours. It's just an opportunity
for those people because high school graduation rates have
been dropping, and it's a way for them to be able to graduate
high school with an accredited high school, not a
ged. They get an actual high school diploma and be able to
go out and do whatever it is they wanted to do.
(14:01):
That that high school diploma barrier was stopping them from to do,
you know, and there's all kinds of reasons people can't, you know,
finish high school. Whether it's personal, whether it's, you know,
language or education, or sometimes it's a financial barrier for
their family that that person has to go out to work. But
I started welding before I finished high school. I don't know why anybody else
(14:23):
couldn't. But the nice thing about the NCCER is they partnered up
with and have a build your future initiative where
these people are going to high schools and talking to seniors
about the benefits of trade programs before they graduate
now. So I think that helps a lot too. You
mentioned a couple times, the nccer. I had Boyd Worsham on the
(14:47):
podcast, the president of the organization, and
he just did a. An outstanding job, you know, really explaining what
the organization is doing and, you know, how they go about
it. So you're just kind of reinforcing. Exactly kind of what they do,
you know, Some of these statistics out there, I follow
on the welding side. Welding workforce data.com that's put out by
(15:09):
the American Welding Society. And the latest Data says
by 2029, we need
320,500 welders by
2029, which is about 80,000
welders every single year to make up that gap, on top
of 157,000
welders retiring. Also, they state that the median wage
(15:32):
is about $26.76 now. That's they
say that's the median wage or 55,000. Talk to
me a little bit about, let's say, if you go to Encore education
and you go through the welding program, for people that are listening,
how long is the program people going to ask, when can
I start making money? When does that happen and what can I expect?
(15:55):
Every program is about 10 months long. Depends on the,
you know, when you fall in into the category of
are you going to have, you know, that week off during July
and that two weeks off at Christmas. It's roughly 10 months
again. And I don't know if Boyd touched on, you know, their actual
curriculum or not, but every curriculum that we use
(16:18):
from them is four levels of
welding, electrical, plumbing or whatever it is. It is a registered
apprenticeship program. We are not an apprenticeship school
because that day go to school for a couple hours and then go to work
the rest of the time. But we do have labs that replicate
what those students will be welding on out in the field.
(16:41):
We start trying to look for jobs for these students about 30
days before graduation. You don't want to get too carried away because,
you know, then you start having the life and job mix and they end up
not graduating from the program, but at about the
30 days, you know, their last few weeks
of the class, they're out there looking for jobs, they're
(17:04):
out there applying for jobs, they're taking weld tests. If it's only
10 months that you're a part of this program, that's not a big
investment of time. If you think about it over a course of like dedicating
four years to college. Right. And spending all that money. So after
the 10 month mark, you said that you can get a
job with local welding shops or local
(17:26):
companies. Is that directly through Encore that
they set that up because of the relationships. We have
a career services division that helps students with
going out on an interview, writing a resume if they need
one, doing all of the steps that needs to be taken, you know,
for that student to just interview and then, hey,
(17:48):
here's a list of jobs. Here's some places we're going to send you to go,
you know, and again, it depends on where
the location is as to where the pay is. And we don't
ever talk about pay, but they do make good money.
They just don't make that $26 an hour yet. Now,
we have a lot of schools in Texas and those people, you know, that's the
(18:11):
heart of the oil field, they're going to do better, but it doesn't mean that
A student that's taking a class in Arizona can't move to
Texas. It doesn't mean anybody can't move anywhere.
Every program that's taught is taught the same at every school. In
your opinion. I mean, everybody's situation is different. I'm just
thinking what people say online because I'm very active on social media and
(18:33):
TikTok and I, you know, I always look at the comments and people who say,
like, and I'm just using welding as an example. You can't make money
in welding. And then someone comes out and says, no, no, no, I'm making,
you know, 100 plus in welding
after x amount of years. But then it comes down to
location. And then there's a lot of people who say, like, I can't get up
(18:54):
and move. And this is my situation. I can't make enough money.
Well, what do I do here? And, you know, would
you recommend somebody say, you're going to have to unfortunately
go where the work is and where the money is, or you just,
you know, you stay put where you are, and then you're going to have to
kind of figure something out, you know, to get to the level you want to
(19:15):
get to. Like, what would you say to someone like that? Because there's a lot
of that out there, a lot of pushback. If somebody's saying they're
not making enough money in welding, they haven't put the time and
effort in to be a good welder. I caught welding for five years
before I started doing this. So welding's my trade. And
I told them, I said I was making
(19:36):
$80,000 a year in the 80s and I
didn't move. I lived in Ohio. There was no pipeline
running through. There were no, you know, refineries or anything like that.
But you have to go find that work. I said, there are people
that run from shutdown to shutdown and make a good
living for six to eight months, and then they take three or four months
(19:58):
off because they made their year's worth of money in that
amount of time. But you have to be up here.
You can't be the welder down here. So improve your
skills. We tell our graduates, once you graduate,
that doesn't mean you can stop coming here. You can come here
and practice. You can come here and ask for a different lead. If
(20:20):
that lead and that job isn't panning out, ask career
services to send you somewhere else. Go out there and learn a different
technique, figure out what it is and what they want,
and then skill yourself to that job. But if
you just sit there and do the same thing over and over and over again,
then you won't improve. You have to diversify and
(20:43):
make sure that you're finding out what that area has
as far as job offerings and make sure you practice those kind
of job offerings. I said there's aerospace jobs all over the
place. Come back and practice that welt. Come back and
practice that. Whatever the material is. There's all
kind of things you can do to upskill yourself because once you
(21:05):
graduate, you can keep coming back here. I just had someone on
the podcast who's in welding and he's the aerospace sector
and they just put a satellite on the moon and he was one of
the people who did the welding of the spacecraft. I mean,
he's in a unique situation and he's doing extremely well. So
sometimes, yeah, you have to go to where the work is. I've even
(21:28):
spoken to welders. Sometimes they have a couple of different jobs, you know, in order
to get to a certain point, money wise,
that you have to level up your skills, you know, get another
certification, maybe go where the work is, maybe the place that you're at,
maybe you've hit a ceiling and you need to move on from there. It really
kind of depends, but it's up to you to do that. And sometimes you just
(21:49):
gotta be, I would say, a little bit assertive. And you gotta go,
you know, to the places where the work is. And sometimes you
got to get in front of people. You have to show them that you show
up on time. These are the soft skills. Forget about the technical skills, just
showing up on time, not being on your phone, just the basic things that
maybe you and I know. But to the younger generation, sometimes
(22:11):
that's not sort of baked in of what they know. Those are the things that
employers really look for. You know, we get feedback from our employers
all the time, and one of the things that they talk about the most
is making sure these people show up on time. And I
go, you can't teach that. You know, I can stand up here and say,
hey, this employer is going to want you to show up on time every day.
(22:33):
If he asks you to work overtime, he's going to want you to work overtime.
But you can't teach that. That person has to either want to do
that or he's not going to want to do that. And that's where I think
you're hearing some of those online stories about,
oh, I do, I work in welding, but I don't make any good money. Well,
that person. You know, as soon as I hear that, it's like
(22:55):
if you're not making good money in the welding field or any other trade
field, you're not a good employee. There are good and bad
employees. I keep telling them, I said, you will, but you
have to change your habits, too. It's not just them.
It's not just them. And you have to, you know,
learn and evolve and get better. It's really up to you. And
(23:18):
it's what you put in is literally what you're going to get
out. How have you seen the technology evolve
over time because of the shortage? And, you know, you look at
cobot welding and you look at different things that they're trying to do to kind
of combat the shortage in the welding side is that opened up
more opportunity for people, kids who are interested in
(23:40):
the gamification side, that, you know, they can run these
cobot machines and use sort of like iPads and that type of stuff,
you know, versus just the standard, you know, welding jobs
that are out there. Yeah, I know what you mean. But the problem with that
is there's only certain amount of things that that can be done on. You
know, there's the repetitive piece that's going to get welded
(24:03):
over and over and over again the same way, and somebody's going to make a
thousand of them. If that robot took my job that I was
doing, that did that, I would be thanking the robot because nobody
wants to sit there for eight hours and weld the same piece over and over
and over again, day in and day out. I said, that's not
how I learned to weld. That's not how. The first company
(24:24):
that I worked for for 20 years, that's not what we did there. We
built things from scratch. So you weren't a welder, you
were a welder fabricator. You had to know how to run a
shear, how to run a brake press, and I didn't know how to
do any of that when I got there. But if you pay attention and you
work with those people, you'll learn to do all that stuff, which
(24:46):
will then make you more valuable to that company. When
kids are going through the actual programs itself, you're
obviously going through with other people who are going through the program, but do they
have any mentorship or people that have sort of been in the
industry for quite a while? I mean, obviously you have the teachers itself, but
is there anybody that you put people in touch with to
(25:08):
speak to about what the future could be within
welding or any type of trade that they're going through.
All right, so that's a good question. So we have a pack meeting
which is the people that are
prospective hires of our students, people in the industry
that come and look at, you know, the curriculum and the labs and,
(25:30):
you know, hey, make recommendations. Do we need this, do we need
that? What do you think? You know, and those people that
come in that are people that are going to employ our students,
we get them to come in as guest speakers to talk to our students
and go, hey, I want you to come in and talk to our students for
an hour on, you know, Thursday night at 6 or 7 o'
(25:52):
clock. Because I'm not going to try to ask them to come during their work
day. A lot of them will come in and I go, all I want you
to do is talk to them about what the expectation
is when they come to work for you or come to work for
you, or come to work for you. Because they need to hear it from
the people that are actually going to employ them. I can sit up
(26:14):
there and preach all day, but if they start hearing it from the people that
are going to employ them, maybe that will make a difference in how
they look at things. You're seeing it sort of firsthand and what you're
going to be, what do employers have to do today because
it is competitive to find a good welder has
options, is it based upon
(26:35):
pay? And that's it. And that's how to get the person to come to your
company. What are you seeing? Why certain people will go to
one company over another handing these trades.
It's not like before where, you know, people would jump ship for 25
cents an hour. I mean, I remember that happening in the 80s a lot,
but now it's more about, that's this generational group
(26:57):
is what are my days off? You know, when do I
get my days off, when do I get vacation? What are the
benefits? I'm going to start a family. So things like that are important.
But the also the other important part of that is
how long have you been in business? Are you going to be in business
for the next 10 years or 15 years? What are you going
(27:20):
to upskill me with when I come to work for you? I might not know
how to do something. Are you going to train me to do that? So those
are things a lot of our students are looking for from employers.
On the other side of that, employers are always looking for students
that know how to do exactly what they do. And I'm
like, we teach a well rounded welding program you know, from
(27:42):
gmaw, gtaw, smaw,
fcaw. But your welding and
your process might be something they're not accustomed to. Are you
willing to, you know, take the time to train them to do
stuff like that? You know, the employer side always wants somebody that
I want him to be able to come in and start that job right away.
(28:04):
We're teaching them how to weld on 7 inch long plates. Is
that all you do is make one 7 inch long weld with one restart? And
it's like, well, no, we don't do that. We. I go, well, then you're going
to have to show them how to do that. We can't replicate
every single well that's out there. Well, to your point. And
again, I'm just using social media. A lot of kids
(28:26):
say, yeah, I have this skill, but there's nobody hiring
somebody with no experience. So if you don't have any experience, how do you get
the job? What do you do in that case? And again,
that's back to the employer. The employers are complaining that,
well, we don't have enough people, we don't have enough people. And then
we're sending them people with, you know, hey, they've never had a job
(28:48):
in welding. They've had 10 months of welding school. They haven't
had a job in welding. Oh, I don't want that person. I want the person
that can come in and start doing the job right away and it's like,
well, good luck finding them. So it's on both sides there. At
some point that has to come together and those
employers got to realize that, okay, wait a minute,
(29:10):
we're going to have to start hiring these people. And some
employers have already embraced that. The ones that don't are
the ones that are going to fall behind and eventually go out of business because
they can't find anybody. Unfortunately, that's what's going to happen.
It's just interesting to hear both sides, but there's a reason why both sides are
feeling this way. Do you have any success stories
(29:31):
that kind of pop up in your mind of any of the trades or anybody
has come through the program who has really excelled up
over the handful of years that you could share with us?
Of course, now I'm not at the campus anymore, but I know when
I was working at the campus there were four or five students
that they excelled by doing more. And what I mean by
(29:54):
that is we had morning, afternoon and evening classes.
So they would take their class in the morning, but stay for
the afternoon and sometimes the evening class. So that they
could practice more and more and more and more. And
this was back in, I want to say, 2012,
those guys got hired to work out at Palo Verde
(30:17):
nuclear power plant at 20, $24 an hour right from
graduation. It is possible, but you have to be
able to make that commitment. I get it. A lot of students can't
make that commitment because of family already having
work obligations. And that's why they come to night school. They're
trying to work during the day, come to school at night to better themselves.
(30:39):
So I get everybody can't do that. But the more that you can
come and practice, the better you'll be and the more that person
will likely hire you and pay you more. And I'm sure you
can always tell the ones that are a step above the others in the
work they do. And if you couple that with the soft skills and you'd
get hopefully a good job, you know, a full career, hopefully from that
(31:02):
organization that can, you know, take you
long term, career wise. Well, even some of those guys
weren't the best welders that I've ever seen at that school. When you
go back to that soft skills part where they showed up every
day, they were on time every day, they had that great attitude
that every employer is looking for. That's what separated them
(31:24):
from the guys that were a little bit better welders but didn't have that
attitude, I'll say. It again, is what you put in is what you're going to
get out. And the opportunities, I think over the next handful of years,
40% retiring and all these different trades that you really
have an opportunity to learn a trade that's an always in
demand. And there's tons of companies out there that are looking for
(31:46):
great individuals that have a good skill set. Again, coupling it with
the soft skills, I think you can do extremely, extremely well in the
trades industry.
Now, the tools of the trade. Bill, this
was an amazing conversation, but in every episode, we
always ask our guests a tools of the trade.
(32:10):
What's one piece of career advice you can
give someone, let's say entering the trades that you
wish you knew when you started out? Okay, when I first
started, I did not know to see what
everyone else was doing and how it was being done. If you
want to, you know, really elevate what you're doing,
(32:32):
watch the other people that have been doing it longer than you, it
will shoot up and you'll get these light bulbs they
say going off in your head going, oh, my goodness, I never
knew this could be done like this or like that or you know,
I didn't know I could learn how to do this and get more money.
So watch what everyone else that has been working there for a
(32:54):
while is doing and how they're doing it. And it will elevate your
skills by a lot. You can reinvent the wheel, but there are people
who've already gone down that path who are successful, get around those people, get around
good people that have a good mindset, that have good skills, that have
good soft skills and that's who you want to be around because
they want to succeed. It's going to rub off on you. So I think that's
(33:16):
sort of great of rights across the board. If people want to find
out more about Ancora education, a little bit more about
anything social related on your end, where would they go to find that?
Ancora.com you know, they can find so much about
our schools, so much about where the locations are.
You can even find them on our schools are listed on the
(33:38):
NCCR website. I suggest they go look at the
NCCR website and see what they're all about so that they
know what they're getting into. Because just because we have
hybrid programs in the trades, that's just meaning you're doing
your reading and your book work. So to say
on your time at home. The trade off is you don't have to come to
(34:00):
school to do that book work. When you come to school you're going
into the lab environment, you're going to learn what you read about.
So if I read about oxy fuel cutting, when I come to school the
next day I'm going to go do oxy fuel cutting.
So you know, learn about what trade and definitely go to
that career builder and fill out it and see what it's all about
(34:24):
and just talk to a lot of people that are in that particular
trade. It'll give you a lot of insight on what trade you may
want to go in in the future. Like you said, the boomers are
retiring at an alarming rate and that was the largest
generation of people. You know, the next group of people
was the Gen Xers. Well, the Gen Xers are already out there working.
(34:46):
You know, if they're not in a trade, they're not going to be, you know,
getting replaced anytime soon. But you gen zers get out there
and you know there's a lot of opportunities because those
boomers that traditionally did all those trade jobs
are actually retiring a lot every year. Bill,
this has been great advice across the board thank you for being on the
(35:08):
show today. Hey, thank you for inviting me. It was good. I liked it.
And thank you to our listeners. If you want more valuable insights and trades
related information, head over to andrewbrown.net and join our
Trades Movement newsletter where we advocate for the trades, share
inspirational stories, provide resources, and you join a
passionate trades community. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast
(35:30):
so you never miss another episode. We'll see you next time.
Thanks for listening to the Lost Art of the Skilled Trades. Visit
us@AndrewBrown.net for more resources and tips.
Join us next time for real stories and meaningful initiatives
as we celebrate our men and women in the skilled trades and shape
(35:52):
the future together.
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.