A Practical Guide to Entering the Trades

An FAQ for those wanting to consider blue collar work but are unsure where to start!

Photograph by: Christopher Burns. Source: Unsplash.

I’ve told the story of how I ended up becoming a plumber, and I’ve attempted to make a case for trade work as a choice career that goes beyond simply listing off the available jobs and telling you that you’ll make good money (which are both true! But there’s so, so much more to say). Since then, I’ve received a couple emails from folks asking, “Okay. I’m picking up what you’re putting down, but where do I even begin?” There’s a lot to think about and for most there is no clear starting point.

So let me give you some personal matters to consider and some practical tips if pursuing a career in a trade is on your radar. Expect many questions, a few self-referential comments, and very few concrete answers.

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DISCLAIMER: I am a non-union residential service plumber. I haven’t worked in any other sector of the plumbing industry, nor have I worked in any other trade, nor again have I belonged to a union. But I have spent 10 years in this world and have friends, co-workers, and professional acquaintances that span the work spectrum and I spend a good deal of time reading/thinking about these things. I am not advocating for a particular trade, for a particular industry, for union or non-union work, or coming down on either side of any other particular pet fight over which pugilistic tradesfolk like to trade punches. I’m simply giving questions for each individual to ask themselves to spur further research and reflection as they consider whether or not a career in the trades might be right for them.

Also, I’m an American and speaking in an American context. Mileage may vary.

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Personal Considerations

Before there is work, there is you: your goals, your capacities, your experiences and desires and needs. Whether you are fit for a trade is a question of your body, your personality, and, in some cases, your finances.

Age, Health, and Physical Ability

It might go without saying, but let me say it anyway: manual labor requires your body. Certain trades more than others. Is your physical condition going to keep you from climbing up scaffolding or slithering through crawl spaces? Is it possible for you to Bavarian pretzel your way under a cabinet or lug a jackhammer around a job site? Mobility, strength, flexibility: all these are going to be necessary at various levels and different times. How many years of labor (and at what intensity?) do you have left in you? Do arthritis or autoimmune diseases plague you? Are they manageable? Are you hypoglycemic? Will you be able to keep snacks handy? Have you had injuries or surgeries or procedures that limit your range of motion or set a maximum threshold of weight you can lift? Have years of smoking stunted lung capacity?

The answers to these questions should factor into whatever work you envision yourself doing.

Can my disposition handle the work? Can my wallet?

A major consideration is one that requires a fair bit of self-awareness: would others describe me as a “people person”¹? Do I actually like people? Do people tend to like me? Am I compassionate? Can I deal with the emotions of a homeowner that is flustered because they’ve had to take time off work to be at home, waiting to receive bad news from my lips and an even badder bill from my hand? OR, am I better suited to little or no customer interaction? Am I a team-player? Do I prefer solitude? Do I want repetition? Or is something new every day, maybe multiple times a day, more my pace? Can I handle interruptions or do I want to do my work and be left alone?

What of my financial needs? It takes time to learn a trade and, especially if you’re considering a midlife career change, the pay isn’t awesome to begin with (unless you’re still in high school, then the money’s incredible and you can ignore the following questions). Can you take the hit in pay for a while? Do you have income to supplement an hourly pay cut, whether that looks like a spouse’s income or a second job? How long can you reasonably live at a lower wage? How does this affect those who might depend on your income? You are very likely to acquire skills that can place you in a position of making more money (and bringing you greater job security) than you presently do, but there is a step back in order to take that leap forward.

What if I have no experience? Am I even mechanically inclined?

With the state of trade work being what it is, you'll be hard pressed to find a skilled trade employer that isn't willing to take anyone with a pulse, frankly². This is good news for you if the “relevant experience” section of your resume is a barren wasteland: your experience (or lack thereof) really shouldn't matter at this point in time. Most companies are more than willing to provide the training and furnish you with the experience that you need during the course of an apprenticeship. Some employers will even see your training through to the point of licensure or certification (more on that in a minute).

As far as mechanical inclination: I didn't have any when I started! There was no indication when I was younger that I could do anything with my hands besides push GameBoy or Playstation controller buttons. I like to say that I didn’t know the difference between a Crescent wrench and a crescent roll. My brother (now a welder) was the one who dis- and re-assembled anything he could touch. But the desire to learn the work and become proficient in it — and the growing needs of my growing family — was enough to snap my hands to attention and teach them what they needed to know. I think "mechanical aptitude" is a bit of a farce, like the food pyramid or standardized testing. The mechanical arts are, if you’ll allow me to use an obscure theological term, mystagogical. One rarely finds the meaning of the work and the proficiency in performing it at the beginning of the road. They are provisioned somewhere further down the way and the path must be traveled to find them.

Practical Tips

These have some overlap with the above, but I think the distinction I’m trying to make is between one’s body and interior life on the one hand, and things related to but outside of me like scheduling and the job market.

What’s available near you? Are you willing to move?

If you live in Montana, it’s unlikely that there’s a high demand for underwater welding. At least, if positions are available, they won’t be as plentiful as in markets located along major bodies of water. Even though California and Texas sit in the top two positions for modern American manufacturing jobs, the Rust Belt states are still major players in that industry and one won’t have much of an issue finding gainful employment there. It very well may be that the work you’d like to do isn’t available near you. In that case, are you willing and able to move? If not, are you willing to consider another trade?

If you’d prefer to stick close to home, one of your most practical considerations ought to be: what’s available around me? When you drive around your city, keep an eye out for the trades that are in your area. What vehicles do you see on the road? Is there construction nearby? What are they building? Ask neighbors or friends if they know anyone in the trades, whether a relative or a friend or someone they worship with or live next to, and try to have conversations with them. You might just go to church with a fella that owns his own plumbing company that happens to be looking for help (hi, yes, that happened to me).

What about licensing and certification?

This is going to vary from state to state. Licensure requirements differ, e.g. Georgia requires three years of verifiable experience to become a plumber; California requires four years; New York requires seven years. The exam in Georgia has no practical portion, it's all knowledge of the code and equations and sizing; other states combine code memorization and academics with a practical portion where you have to demonstrate competence in certain hands on skills as proof that you have the years of experience they're looking for. So find your government's licensing board's website to see what demands they'll put on you to award you your license.

NOTE: Trades that are governed by a licensing board in some states are not in others. You’ll have to do the research to see what is required by your state or the state to which you hope to move.

Service or Construction? Residential or Commercial/Industrial? Do I need tools?

Is a set schedule a deal-maker? Then service work—whether it’s in a residential, commercial, or industrial application—probably isn’t a good choice. The service industry as it currently exists largely runs 24/7/365 or has a heavy third shift component, particularly corporate companies and big factories. New construction, however, might suit you better as its hours tend to be rigid as determined by local traffic flow, noise ordinances, and other considerations. Service work, especially residential, is very people-heavy: you’ll have to wear a white glove on one hand and a cut-resistant nitrile glove on the other, balancing a person’s needs with the building’s. Construction, on the other hand, allows you to show up, build, and (hopefully, if all goes well) go home.

Building homes leaves you pretty close to or even under the ground; building skyscrapers is, uh, mostly the opposite. Materials and tools for residential construction tend to be smaller; the opposite is true at the commercial and industrial levels. If your employer requires that you furnish your own tools, residential scale tooling is often cheaper than that at the commercial or industrial scale. But, from experience, the affordability of tools mixed with cult-level brand loyalty correlates heavily to a tradesperson’s arsenal. If you think in-app purchases on your phone are bad, wait until you get your first taste of Milwaukee Tools or encounter RIDGID or Klein at a road-show.

Should I join a union or no? Should I work for a corporation or stick with a mom-and-pop?

Politics aside, these questions are going to center mostly on job security and work culture. Unions have their own schools which provide thorough, well-rounded training that is both academic AND practical (but doesn’t usually involve the service side of things; mainly construction or commercial/industrial). The union will normally take care of job placement for you and will ensure you get fair pay, good hours, proper breaks/lunches, and come to your defense if these agreed upon details are not, in fact, provided. BUT you’ll have to pay union dues. Over time, unions have become politically charged and bureaucratized, which I suppose can be read as a positive or a negative depending on the person. Unions tend to have among their ranks the very embodiments of the vice of Sloth, who do bare minimum because they know they can get away with it because the union will protect them, which can create a real bummer of an environment if you’re the hardest worker in the group.

If you go the non-union, mom-and-pop route, you’ll earn while you learn, and you’ll learn everything the company does or takes on: residential, commercial, new construction, service, whatever, while avoiding most of the bureaucracy that comes with scaling a business. On the flip side, training is less comprehensive and you’re limited to learning what your boss and the other technicians want to do and teach you. These companies have no obligation to keep you on and defending yourself if you feel you aren’t being treated properly is on you. And with smaller businesses, you only work as long as there IS work, which isn’t always a given.

What about larger construction companies? Like my employer, larger companies can provide a steadier workflow, their own in-house training, and a reasonable amount of job security if they have a respected name in the local market. But with bigger businesses comes politics, the professionalization of management, the possibilities and problems of scaling, and on the list goes.

Finding a job: mikeroweWORKS

If you want to see what’s actually available around you but don’t care to get in the car, perhaps the single best tool for doing so is the “Jobs” page of Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe’s foundation, mikeroweWORKS³. Mike Rowe has become the face and voice of the manual labor world, an advocate for hard work and friend to blue collar workers. His foundation awards work ethic scholarships to those wanting to get into a skilled trade, and have done so to the tune of nearly $7million at the time of writing.

Mike Rowe (left) with a new take on the old “Work Smart, Not Hard” poster you might have seen in a guidance counselor’s office at some point. Originally, the college graduate looks plucky and the manual laborer like they’d just been picked last for the dodgeball team. Rowe turns it around for our current moment.

Find a job. Apply. Get Mike Rowe’s money. Have a nice career. It’s that easy.⁴

Miscellaneous Considerations

There are also questions of philosophical and theological import which I have not asked above. Some have thought that our conception of work is very much worth a good Socratic grilling⁵ while others don’t see a need to inquire this deeply. Either way, some other questions one might find worthy of asking are:

Why do I want do this work? Is the company I’m working for ethical? Does the work I might do matter? Does this work or employer align with or contradict my religious values? Am I working to build or maintain a beneficial or a parasitic system? Are the materials we use ethically sourced? Do the skills from this work translate to other areas of my life? Does this work appear meaningful in and of itself, or must I provide meaning in some other way? Is there upward mobility? Do I want to own my own business one day? How does this work shape me?

If these philosophical questions related to work and technology and societal structures are of interest to you, you may enjoy the books and/or Substacks of:

Matthew B. Crawford,

L. Michael Sacasas,

and Paul Kingsnorth.

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I ask for the forgiveness of tradesfolk who have noticed inaccuracies or omissions. I’m sure there are considerations and industries that I am blind to and have missed entirely.

I hope that this guide was of some use to those who are searching among the mechanical arts⁶ for a possible career but were unsure of where to start. If you have benefited, please consider subscribing to my Substack (all of my writing is free, but a paid subscription would be most welcome) and sharing this article with friends and family. Until next time!

1. While perhaps not the most important question, there is a very real sense in which we do not know ourselves well unless our self-knowledge is informed by the perspectives of those around us. I may feel like a people person, but perhaps my wife is privy to something about me that I am not. I’m not suggesting that this question is most important, but it is also not unimportant: how we come off to others matters. This should have some formative influence on our self-perception.

2. It may seem trite, but it’s true. Employers are desperate. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all you have to offer is a heartbeat, of course: give the best you’ve got! Prove that you’re more than a pulse!

3. This is not a paid sponsorship from Mike Rowe but I’d love for it to be. HMU, Mike.

4. It’s not quite that easy.

5. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle used this phrase in the preface to their book Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living in their discussion of Thoreau who is often thought of as anti-work. They convincingly argue that this is not the case: Thoreau questioned why we work, the exact thing I am leading you to ask in these final considerations, but he was no slouch as demonstrated by his own labor across many careers, his literary corpus, and the testimony of not a few who knew him.

6. “The mechanical arts” is a title used by medieval writers when referring to manual labor, most famously by Hugh of St. Victor. Although the formulation “mechanical arts” was not his, he masterfully lays the seven mechanical arts alongside the seven liberal arts, all of which properly belong to philosophy: the love-born search for Wisdom.