You can do very well for yourself. You can start your own business. A lot of these certificate programs teach entrepreneurial training and the soft skills of, you know, customer service and how to interact with people and, you know, how how to position yourself for success as a business, not just as somebody in the trade. So there is great opportunity if you go down that path.
Welcome to the Up Your Average podcast, where Keith and Doug give no nonsense advice to level up your life. So buckle up and listen closely to Up Your Average.
Good morning, Doug. Hey. I am excited to get to hang out with our new friend Jason today. Jason Altmeyer is the author of Trade Up, and I'm bringing Paul and Bridget Williams back to the conversation. Are you good with that?
I'm good with it, and when you told me you were gonna interview Jason today, I thought, I better read his book real fast. And so the first thing I did is judged a book by its cover. And when I judged the book by its cover, me being an idiot, Jason, I apologize. I saw the words trade up and I was like, oh, this is he must have a great stock market trading strategy here. And then I thought, well, why is it, why are
there two by fours and
a wrench? And my brain stopped. And so I am so happy to see that you're friends with Mike Rowe, and that we're talking about a different kind of trading up today, And that just lights my fire, thinking about some of my friends who have really done excellent work in the trade up department.
It is just a blast to think differently about these things for us, Jason. The hypothetical couple that we've been helping with some of these podcasts are Paul and Bridget Williams, and we just pick a random age or situation for them. And what I thought we could talk about is that Paul and Bridget now have a 10 and 12 year old. They've got they feel this financial burden that a lot of parents feel like, I gotta pay, I have five kids, so I put five kids through college, and I don't know how anybody can do that without having a lot of stuff going on. So in our most recent newsletter, it's called The Anchor, I was writing about that you have to think really differently about education as you're going forward.
Think, I don't think you could do it like when I was in the eighties and doing it. And so I'm envisioning Paul and Bridget, they're feeling the stress of life right now, right? They're thinking, what are we going to do? How are we going to help these kids? And your book just offers a lot of resources.
And so if you're thinking about those young parents with those young kids and trying to help them navigate their future at this point, what would be the top two or three things you would throw out to them?
I think being well educated on what the job opportunities are going to be in the future, because you certainly don't want to dissuade someone from pursuing their passion and taking advantage of their talents and moving in that direction, but if you want to study anthropology or poetry or film or some other, you know, art history, you know, that's fine, but understand that the job opportunities may not be as plentiful if you take that route than if you go in a different direction, and that different direction can certainly include four year degrees. We we don't argue that that's the wrong path in every case, but what we do argue in the book is that the stigma associated with the trades, dissuading people from pursuing careers, and I would put nursing in that category too. Nursing is a career where there's 190,000 job openings right now as we speak in nursing, so when we talk about the job opportunities of the future, healthcare and nursing is gonna be a big part of that too, but if you're interested in the skilled trades, and by that I'm talking the blue collar professions like welding, the electricians, high wire linemen, underwater construction, aviation technicians, auto technicians, plumbers, HVACs, all the rest, you can make a very good living doing that.
So if, you know, for your couple that you're talking to, if if you're advising their children at that age on what their career path should be, I I would open their mind to the possibility that the trades might be something they would want to explore if they're interested.
In my day, and I'm the old guy on this show today, but in my day, I had shop class and we even had home economics class that the young men would go into. And so are there avenues to get these young people on ramp to at least open their minds to the possibility of these? Because I heard a lot of like the SHOP classes no longer exist, so how would Paul and Bridget introduce their kids to these ideas?
Vocational education, CTE, Career and Technical Education, is coming back at the high school level in a very big way across the country. The shop class that you and I remember, and Keith, when we were younger, maybe involved carpentry and rudimentary skills. Honestly a lot of those classes were designed for folks who didn't have an interest in education in four years, and it was viewed as sort of the lesser path, and thankfully, we've moved away from that as a country, and we recognize that there's great value in the trades, and high schools all across the country are creating trade schools. If you look at Father Judge High School in Philadelphia, they have a welding campus, and they graduated this year 25 students, all of whom at 18 years old had job offers of over $50,000 a year when they graduated high school. Up in White Plains, New York, they just as a school board voted to clear 75 acres and build a state of the art trade school that's gonna include all of those specialties that I talked about.
So it is coming back. Massachusetts, there's thousands of people on the waiting list, students at the high school level. So if you have a 10 year old and a 12 year old, especially a girl, you know, girls have tended to go in other directions, and if they show an interest in this, oftentimes parents will try to steer them in a different direction. We need more women in the trades, and that they're half the population of the country, they're excellent at it. I have visited over 200 trade schools in the country, and you see a growing number of women that are getting into it, and very often I'm told those are the best students, and they do very well after they graduate.
So I would say to the parents, just be open minded, and these gender stereotypes with occupations and careers, you know, they set in very early. So if you have, especially a young girl who shows interest in a blue collar trade, you know, let her explore it and see if it's the right move for her.
In that same vein, like, I'll admit my limitations, like stereotypically, but like it would seem like if there's a big shortage in nurses, the idea of young men pursuing that, it seems like that they could, I don't know what the numbers are, they could pursue that as easily as maybe becoming a doctor and have a pretty nice income at a pretty early age, it would seem like.
15% of nurses are males, so there's still room to grow on that. To put that in perspective, about 5% of welders are females. 5% of people across the skilled trades generally, that number is the same for females. And there is room to grow on both sides of that, and if, you know, if you wanna be a physician, that that's a different path, that's a much longer educational process, more difficult path, go for it, you know, if if that's where you wanna be, but a lot of people have chosen nursing as a career, I think it's about 3,000,000 nurses we have in the country right now, and as I said, about 190,000 vacancies as we speak. So you will not have trouble finding a job if you choose nursing as a career.
So in 1980, a friend of mine, he took shop class through high school, and he took a job as a cabinet builder in 1980, and I was in college during that time, and kind of watched his career unfold, and then the financial guy, I mean, started doing the math. And one of the things that I don't think is discussed much is those four years opportunity cost of me sitting in a classroom, and he had four years of wages. And those four years at that age, he stayed at home. So by the time he was 22, he had a pretty substantial nest egg. Whereas if you take that same kind of thought process today, it would seem like your kids, if you could allow them to stay home for those four years, they could have a really nice jump start if they went into one of these trades with some of those nice incomes.
We do talk about that in the book. Maybe that's why you asked it, because you know we quantify that question of the opportunity cost, and these programs in the trades, they're short term programs. They're less than a year, and there is an opportunity cost to not having to study Chaucer and learn, you know, whatever, poetry or American history, whatever it might be, which is critically important, but you don't have to have that as part of the educational curriculum when you're getting a certificate in the trades, and if you go five years out of high school, the person who chooses the trade program is $150,000 ahead of the person who chose the four year path. And over time, depending on what you choose, you can make up that gap. But oftentimes, that gap will stay with you because the people who graduated in the trades are growing in their careers too.
There's another philosophical kind of thing that, for me personally, the classroom was not the best way for me to learn, and so I, with my skills, I underperformed on a grade rather than what I could understand. I don't know if that makes sense or not. And one of the things I've observed with the classic education system is it's catered to a certain idea of what's important to know. And I've thought a lot about my friends that were in the trades, and a lot of the things that they need to know for those trades weren't the things they were taught even in grade school or high school. And philosophically, I think they were told that they're not smart.
They weren't said that bluntly, but they didn't do well in the grades, and the grades then they would get in their psyche, but they're very, very smart with the things they do with their hands and the way that they use their trades. So how would you help somebody think through that part of it? It's more of a self esteem thing that the whole system is kind of working against their giftedness, I'd say.
Part of that is incumbent upon us to not impose that stigma upon people, because the reason they feel that way is because for whatever reason, they feel like not going into college, not succeeding academically in the classroom, for some reason makes you less successful or less worthy, and that stigma is there because they have felt that by the people around them. It could be guidance counselors, it could be parents, It could be teachers, people in the community. So we play a role in making sure that that person doesn't feel that way. But I think as we go forward and you look at the job opportunities that exist, building data centers, semiconductor manufacturing, nuclear, shipbuilding, infrastructure, bringing manufacturing back to America, there are millions of jobs that are going to be out there, and you can do very well for yourself, and you can sustain a living. And to your question, you are twice as likely to start your own business if you get a certificate in the trades as you are getting a four year degree from college.
I want to encourage the people who maybe have been stuck, they are in college right now, or they're about ready, maybe they just graduated from college, and they're wondering, Why did I do this? If you're thinking about going into the trades, there is a hurdle to get in, and that hurdle is you're going to have to know some math, you're going have to pass some tests, and something interesting that I've been seeing, Jason is a friend of mine, tutor, and he has been hired to tutor young adults in math to help them pass the electric unions test, or help them become proficient in an area that maybe they haven't dusted off in a while. And so there's a business out there to help people get to the next level and level up themselves. And so that's the thing about this that I really like, and I notice you've got a bunch of books on your shelf, but there's two other things on your shelf behind your left shoulder there. Two balls.
And it looks like a football maybe, is it a football?
Well, this
is
The basketball is a basketball signed by Bill Walton, the UCLA and great NBA player. I I met with him. I served in congress, and he came in to meet with me and gave me that, and it's very nice, personalized, and he's now passed, so I display it. The other thing is typical of what we're saying is a hard hat. That's that's actually nice.
Nice. That's
That's a hard hat with my name on it. I did a groundbreaking ceremony for a large employer that was breaking ground on a new facility, so I kept the hard hat, that's what that is.
So my question to you then is like, were sports part of your life growing up?
Yeah, yeah, well the other shelf, which you can't see, is some of my sports mementos, but yeah, yeah, I'm a sports fan, played, and still follow it.
And what effect does that have on a guy or a gal who wants to go into the trades?
Well I think you learn teamwork, you learn hard work, you learn setting long term goals that don't have an immediate payoff but will pay off later, and then setting a path to achieving that goal and improving yourself, and as an you know, the academic component of it is learning as much as you can about the skill that you're trying to acquire, and always being ready for what is to come. You know, one of the things, this isn't necessarily sports, well it's not sports related, but it's related to this goal setting idea, is I was doing one of these interviews recently, and somebody asked me, what is the one lesson, like if you can only choose one thing that you learned while you were in Congress that you could apply to people in business, to young people, you know, as like a life goal? How would you articulate that? And I said, park at the end of the parade. And they kind of flinched and said, what do you mean by that?
What does that mean? And I said, well, when you're in politics, you're in a lot of parades, right? July 4, Memorial Day, you know, you walk, and if you park at the beginning of the parade, when the parade is over, you have to walk all the way back through the crowd, see all the same people you just met, and then you have to drive around the road closures and all the rest that are disrupting your path because of this parade. And the person interviewing me said, well, okay, that's interesting, but is that really the most important life lesson that you would give to a young person? And I said, Yeah, because it's not about the parade at all.
It has nothing to do with the parade. It's about planning. It's about setting yourself and putting yourself in position to move forward, and clearing the obstacles from your path, and doing everything that you can to be ready to move when opportunity comes. So, you know, sports is kinda like that too, where regardless of how successful an individual may or may not have been in sports, the teamwork aspect and goal setting and the hard work that goes into achieving that goal, that's all applicable to business and in life.
I think that kind of bleeds into what we were talking about with Paul and Bridget and a 10 and 12 year old, that they need some time as parents to get out of the paradigm that they've been thinking most of their life. Like how do we help our kids, not necessarily say they have to go into the trades, but how do we get informed well enough as parents to help them open that as a possibility?
One of the things that we talk about in the book is creating statewide databases, and regional databases, with accurate information about what the job demand is in your region and in your state, and what the career path is to get there, what's the educational pipeline that you have to go through, and then what realistically can you make as compensation in that role? And that really doesn't exist right now, so when you're sitting with a guidance counselor, or you're the parent of those two children, and you're sitting down with them and thinking through what path they want to take from an educational perspective, You can Google things, but there's really no central resource that has all of that information. Well, let's take a look. We wanna live in Indianapolis. Where are the jobs?
What's happening in Indiana? And if you want to pursue a career in those jobs that are in the most demand, what does that look like? What does your educational pathway look? What's it going to cost, and how much are you going to make? So I think for those two children, that's really valuable information. I was
I kind of I thought I misread part of the book there, and I forgot which of the individuals it was, but somebody got a job in Indiana building submarines. And I'm like, oh, yeah. Didn't know that was a thing.
Yeah. He worked, I forget that was one of the students that we profiled, but there was a company in Indiana contractor that he worked for.
Yeah. That's one of the big needs. Mike Rowe talks about it all the time,
There's about building 200,000 job shortage in the next ten years, so 20,000 a year on average job openings that can't be filled. Fewer workers that we're producing than there are jobs available, 200,000 over ten years.
So Jason, one of the things that Connie and I did when our kids were in high school is we hired a career consultant to help assess their personalities and direct them and give them, help narrow it down. Because I think where I see a lot of what you've written about is that we believe that everybody is gifted and has value and purpose. And difficult thing, a difficult thing for people is, what am I supposed to do when I grow up? And so that career counselor we hired was really helpful in saying, these are some things out there. And just as, you know, the entrepreneur in me, when I was reading through your writing, I thought, man, there's a lot of resources here.
And if somebody made themself a consultant, not just the database you're referring to, but if somebody made themself a consultant to help in these areas too, they became familiar with all the resources, like the idea of the Pell Grants for trades, I had no idea that was even a thing.
Yeah, that's new. That starts July 1 year for the first time people can use the Pell Grant for short term programs. So that that'll be for things like heavy equipment, could be phlebotomy in health care, high wire linemen, truck driving, students who pursued that, and oftentimes those students come from low income backgrounds, disadvantaged populations, don't have access to resources to pay for those type of programs. Having the Pell Grant accessible to them, do a short term program, and as we were talking about, get out into the workforce, start making money, that's really valuable.
Jason, I'm guessing you have a high education background, am I right?
Have, you know, people always ask me this, I have three degrees, have a doctorate, a master's, and an undergrad, and they always say, well, how come you didn't follow your own advice? And you know, I did follow my own advice, right? I had a passion and a career trajectory that I had in mind, and I've worked on it over years, and I can't do the things that we're talking about. I'm not the person, you know, who can go and fix things, if you heard my Micro podcast, this, like when the filter goes out on the refrigerator or something happens around the house, I'm the first one to say, call the guy, get somebody in here that can fix it, and I really admire people who can do that, and use their hands, and see the fruits of their labor. And I'm jealous when I speak to these trade schools.
I've visited over 200 of them, and sometimes they'll gather the students. I always tell them, I'm jealous that you get to do this, because I don't know how to do this, and whatever somebody's career path is. So it's not that one is greater or lesser than the other, we're all living on this planet together, and you choose your path, and we just want to make sure everyone is able to pursue whatever career is of interest and most appropriate for them.
Man, I love how you answered that, because I'm the same way. Well, except I'm not a doctor, and I'm a C student. But I love that you have no doctor title in here, you're just Jason, and I appreciate that, and I love the way that you respect other people's passions and God given talents. And I figured that's what you were gonna say, but I'm wondering, where did this idea for you start to want to champion and cheer on the person that you respect and admire? Was it something that sparked a couple years ago?
Was it something maybe you learned from your mom or dad? What was it that really sparked this interest to cheer on the next generation?
I do have a co author, Riley Burr, and we work together, I lead the National Association for Private Trade Schools and Career Colleges, and Riley works with me, she runs our associate, or our foundation, CQ Research Foundation. And what we, you see is this issue is in the news every day, every day. We have morning news clips that we put out to our members, thousands of subscribers, and we put out workforce development news, and about, I would say, six months ago or so, we saw, we looked back because there was like 10 or 12 stories every day in the national paper about workforce shortages. We can't find enough electricians, we can't build data centers because there's not enough workers, employers are struggling to fill gaps. And I said, Go back a year ago, and average, look at this month, and let's see how many stories were in the news.
And was four stories in the news a year ago, and 11 stories in the news every day six months ago, and it's gotten even more since then. So I just think it's a story that needs to be told, and we use this book to be sort of a central clearinghouse on explaining the issue, and there's no shortage of people who can do that, but we offer solutions, how you solve the problem, and we do what Keith was talking about. We kind of use it as a parental guide, or even somebody in mid career who's looking to change. What's it like to go to a trade school? What's the process to get in?
What happens when you're there? How does it work when you get out? How do apprenticeships work? We explain all of that. So for anyone who's interested in pursuing a career in the trades, or maybe thinking about changing careers, or they're a parent of these two children that you talk about, I think this book is a great way to flip through and see what all of that means, and then make an informed decision.
Man, great Father's Day present coming up.
Absolutely. Now, that idea of a consultant, beyond just like a career someone, but somebody that's familiar with the trades, are there very many of those kind of people out there, or do they exist, or is that a path for somebody that wants to take the initiative on that?
We need more of it. We need not only what you're talking about, but with regard to apprenticeships, there are intermediaries that, they exist in this country, but other countries, especially in Europe, use them to a much greater capacity than we do, and that helps match employers to workers, and possible apprenticeships, and helping employers navigate the red tape and the bureaucratic process that you have to go through to get certified as a registered apprenticeship, and then apprenticeships take four or five years, and continuing along that, there is not only a cost, a direct cost to that apprentice being there, you have to pay them, and they're not, in the beginning at least, as productive as the pay that you're giving them because they're new, that changes over time, but there's also the instructor and the mentor who's a paid employee who's now having to spend a lot of time with this apprentice, and that kind of reduces their productivity too. So there's an opportunity cost as well as a direct cost. But in the end, it's very valuable to have apprentices, so having people out there as intermediaries that can help employers and workers navigate that process, we could use more of that.
That was one of the things I wrote down, Jason, is that we as a firm, I don't think we do internships anymore. Done a lot of them, but they cost us so much. And you know, we're not trying to conquer the universe, we don't need tons of employees, but it was kind of us giving back to the world. But it just says a lot. So when I was reading through the different things that are available out there, I didn't see a lot about employer incentives so that maybe there was some kind of incremental incentive.
I know like you get to take the cost of an employee off your profits and things like that, but if somebody's really struggling with those apprentices, it seemed like there would be some kind of incentive. Most of them seem like for the employees with the Pell Grants and things like that, but are there incentives for the employers to do these things?
There are some at both the federal and the state level, but there should be more, and there should be more directed to small and mid sized employers, because there's no distinction made. When you apply for an apprenticeship, you could be General Motors, or you could be a small business in rural Indiana somewhere, you know, and you wanna do it, but you have all this paperwork, and how are you gonna find out? You have to get it approved, it has to be an approved profession, and you know, all of these things. So helping especially smaller employers through grants and tax credits and things like that is really, really important. And there's also the idea, moving aside from apprenticeships, of employers being able to offer pretax benefits to employees who want to pursue upskilling.
Don't want to lose your employees, of course, but you you want them to be as well trained as they can possibly be, and there's a cost to that. So helping employers navigate that is important.
One of our clients asked me to look at his profit and loss statement a few months ago, and it was a pretty large company, and as I was going through it, one of the things that jumped out at me is I told him, It looked like you don't spend very much on training. And as I was reading your book, was thinking, Wow, they could even, in my way of thinking about their business, they could even have a division of their business that kind of trained some of their contractors, taking advantage of some of the things I'm talking about here.
Yeah, for sure. That's something we talk about in the book. And you know, kind of roll our eyes when the first solution anybody offers is increasing government funding or more grants, it has to be well targeted and utilized in a way that's gonna be a benefit, not just a big spending program that goes and you don't even know how the money is spent. But like the US Chamber of Commerce, a great suggestion that they have our skilled savings accounts that would look like health savings accounts that employers are able to offer, but you as the employee would be able to use that for your own upskilling as well. If you target these incentives in the right way, they can make a difference and not just be big government spending.
Well, you've really brought a lot to the equation, I think, for young people and their parents to really think forward, I think, about these things. Are there any kind of top one or two things you'd tell this young couple with their kids as they're looking to the future? I guess before I jump to that, one other thing I was thinking was a I I see it kind of as a financial challenge tied with a cultural challenge, because the challenge of getting more people with the trade, another part of it, which I didn't see, I might have skimmed too fast when I was reading, but we also have a shortage of children coming along. That birth thing is gonna kind of give you a geometric problem with this. And so when I listen to young people, if they're thinking I have to pay all this money for my kid's college, and I gotta do all this stuff for my kids, which we didn't really feel that when I was younger, I think that affects the birth rate that we have in the country, because people are like, I can't afford kids.
So those things seem like they're gonna go hand in hand in really challenging those things.
There was a great opinion editorial written this week as we speak, and I believe it was the Washington Post, trying to explain why there's fewer births, and we have this population decline, it's not just in America, it's around the world, so you can compare what's happening in this country to other countries, and that's a longer discussion, but it's really interesting because it is happening, and there appears to be no subsidence to it in the future. We are on a population decline in the world and in America. So what we talk about in the book is the numbers are daunting. If you wanna solve the workforce crisis, the number of people 65 increases by three percent every year, while the number of people 18 decreases by point 2% every year. There are 15% fewer children in kindergarten today than there are seniors in high school, and that gap widens every year until 2041, and probably after, because 2041 is the current births for high school.
So it is really challenging when you think about long term solutions. Mike Rowe always talks about, and this is a number you'll hear people use, for every five retirements in the trades, there are only two people to replace them. So where are we going to get the workers in the future? We have this population decline, and then you think about the trades. Nurses, for example, the average nurse is 52 years old.
The average person in the skilled trades, the blue collar trades, is in their mid forties, so getting more young people, getting more women into the trades is really important. And then the people who are retiring, at some point, people are living longer, but they're also utilizing our healthcare system to a degree that is unprecedented in our history, and that causes the challenges as well to government expenditures and setting priorities on how to allocate money, and then also just people needing services. So it it, the decline in the birth rate is not just an academic interesting theory to look at, it is really damaging to the long term prosperity of the country, and I would say it's a threat to our competitiveness. If we can't find the workers to do these jobs, we're not gonna be able to compete globally in the same way we have as a country.
Man, for the go getter, for the right attitude, this all sounds awesome to me. There's a lot of upside ahead for people.
A lot of job opportunity, for sure. If you're interested, you have an aptitude for it, I mean you could be like me and not have an aptitude for it, but there's a lot of people who do, and they want to do it, and I guess our message is you can do very well for yourself, you can start your own business, a lot of these certificate programs teach entrepreneurial training and the soft skills of customer service and how to interact with people, and how to position yourself for success as a business, not just as somebody in the trade. So there is great opportunity if you go down that path.
I think as a financial advisor, Jason, I would even throw out there, I was reading about Kyle Busch's charity, something like Bundles of Joy, and I would throw out there to those young people out there, don't be afraid of the trades, don't be afraid of having a bunch of kids, because those things are all valuable, they will add, they will make the world a better place. And so I didn't really mean to jump in on the birth thing, but I just think as a dad of five kids, I can't think of anything greater that's happened in my life. And I think encouraging young people to think differently, not only about careers, but about their families and what matters is a big deal. It's really been, it's been an honor for us to hang out with you today.
Thank you. I appreciate that. And I did hear, we had the technical issue in the beginning, I did hear Keith, you talk about the cover of the book, and as you can imagine, when you pour your heart into this, you know, again, my co author Riley and I, we worked for a long time and did a lot of research, and you want it to be perfect. The cover is really important. So going through the process of picking a cover.
So the reason there is a wrench and a two by four, and we realize that you would not generally use a wrench on a two by four, because obviously it's symbolic, right? Not meant literally, but we looked at a bunch of other things. We looked at using a hammer as the T in trades. We looked at having a tool belt at the bottom. Just, I don't know, we wanted to be clean and sharp and easily decipherable, and we felt like that was the best way to send the message.
So I get what you're saying, but it's more symbolic than it's meant to be literal.
Well, are dishonored with your time and thank you very much. And we just wish you the best in cheering on our country. Yeah, and congratulations.
Thank you both. Good talking to you.