Schooling the Youth

Little trick of the publishing trade to share with you today. Yes, this monthly editorial is my chance to get up on the soapbox and share my opinions about the topics of the day, but it is also an engagement tool. Now that you’ve made it all the way to the end of the magazine, I’m trying to get you to flip back and visit some articles you may have overlooked (or, if you’re reading this online, to get you to click a few more links I think will be worth your time).

We have an outstanding lineup this month, with Editor-at-Large John Mesenbrink writing about cultivating a safety culture for the feature, a forum piece on worker retention through training from Franklin Electric’s Rachel Batdorff, the return of one-time columnist Joe Fiedrich with an excellent hydronic/radiant case study to share, and of course our monthly Murderers' Row of columnists (if you’ll forgive the obscure baseball reference).

But what has struck me especially this month is how many great stories have crossed my desk about companies and organizations reaching out to young people—sometimes very young people—to encourage their involvement in the skilled trades.

For one example, the PHCC Educational Foundation and SkillsUSA are partnering to support organized plumbing competitions, and the value of those competitions as a recruitment tool. For another, toolmaker DeWalt is rewarding the student winners of ABC’s Construction Management Competition.

But the competitors in those stories are nearly young adults, with their feet set on the path to a career in the trades. Tools & Tiaras is sponsoring a workshop open to girls as young a six-years-old to help them learn what a career in the trades involves. Oatey Co. is sponsoring a summer camp for girls as young as 12 with a similar mission.  

If I had to pick the one topic this magazine has devoted the most ink to during my near 30 years on staff, it would have to be the difficulties contractors have finding and retaining skilled workers.

We’ve covered government and private investment in training; we’ve talked about cultural pressures (vocational training vs. four-year college and the influence of parents and guidance counselors); we’ve talked about in-person training, online training, virtual training; we’ve talked about attracting more women, more minorities, more veterans to the trades.

Heck, we’ve run columns that were flat-out rants about how “none of these damn kids wants to work”—which I do not feel is a fair assessment of the younger generation, but I can appreciate the frustration that fuels that opinion in many of our readers.

Yes, the skills gap remains a crisis. Yes, we are looking at a deficit of more than half a million plumbers by 2027. But it is starting to feel like all these public and private efforts, combined, are beginning to bear some fruit. No, I don’t have any hard numbers to share—no graph I can point to where the line is starting to bend—just a sentiment I’m getting from the people I’ve been interviewing.

Next month is our September “Back to School” issue, and the feature will be on various workforce development and training programs around the nation. Along the way we will try to gather more anecdotal evidence on whether attitudes towards the trades are, in fact, changing among today’s youth.

If you feel things are changing—or not, or even getting worse—please reach out to me, Steve Spaulding at [email protected] with your opinions and your reasons why. I’ll be sure to share in my next editorial.