The contradiction at the center of America’s skilled-labor shortage was distilled into nine words at Ford Pro Accelerate, the Blue Oval’s giant workforce-development event in Detroit.
“We value the skill, but maybe not for my child,” said Chelle Travis, executive director of SkillsUSA, a national workforce-development organization focused on students in career and technical education.
That tension—respect for the work but lingering resistance to seeing it as an aspirational future for one’s own children—surfaced repeatedly during Travis’ panel. Students, educators, social-media creators and industry advocates described a culture that continues to treat college as the default marker of success, even as employers seek more technicians, mechanics, builders and other skilled workers.
“We don’t really have a value problem, but we have a knowledge and really a connection problem,” Travis said. “Students and parents still do not know about all the opportunities, those family-sustaining wage opportunities for students. And it’s still seen as, ‘It’s not for me’ or ‘It’s not for my child.’”
Derek Feldmann, managing director at the Ad Council Research Institute, who partnered with Ford on a massive survey on young people’s attitudes toward the trades, said the research found a disconnect between what young people say they want from a career—financial stability, fulfillment and advancement—and how few identify the trades as a route to those goals.
Just 11% of the students surveyed were genuinely interested in pursuing trade careers, Feldmann said, even though 38% said they would consider one. “If we were to tell our 18-year-olds and 17-year-olds, ‘What does the path to college look like?’ They’ll repeat things like, ‘You apply, you then go for four or five or six years, you then exit and you get a job,’” Feldmann said. “The same thing even for military service. You go to basic training, you go do these kinds of things. And you start to ask, what about the trades? Silence.”
While college is not always a simple or linear path, it is institutionally legible. Students know about applications, financial aid, campus visits, majors and graduation. The skilled trades can appear more fragmented: high-school career-and-technical education programs, union apprenticeships, community colleges, private training programs, employer-sponsored training and direct-entry jobs all offer possible routes, but not every student has access to a counselor, parent or mentor who can explain the differences.
“It’s easier to go with what’s known than what’s unknown,” Feldmann said.
Parents and the prestige gap
That information gap is also a prestige gap.
Matt Panella, a carpenter and home builder who has built a sizable social-media audience, appeared on the panel and said he regularly hears from teenagers who want to pursue the trades but need help making the case to their parents.
“We have a lot of kids out there that their parents, for years now, we’ve told kids that the way to success is going to college,” Panella said. “I get a lot of high school kids, ninth grade through 12th, reaching out and saying, ‘Hey, I want to get into the trades, but my parents don’t feel like it’s a viable career path. What can I do to show them?’”
Panella said his online presence is partly meant to give young people a visible guide when they lack a personal connection to the industry. He said his father and grandfather helped him enter the field; not every prospective worker has that advantage.
“I had somebody and I wanted to be that somebody for other people that don’t have that,” he said.
Tanisha Brana, a Detroit educator who works with students weighing their options after high school, said she encourages families to think of career-tech courses as a low-cost opportunity to test a potential profession.
“I would recommend that all students and even parents have their kids try a career-tech program first, because it’s low risk. It’s zero dollars. It’s completely free,” Brana said. “I call it the ‘try it before you buy it’ method.”
The approach lets a student interested in welding, for instance, spend time in a welding course, meet a mentor, pursue an internship and learn whether the work actually suits them. If it does not, Brana said, the student has not spent years and thousands of dollars discovering that a chosen major was a poor fit.
“Even the kids that find out this is not what they thought it was—they paid zero dollars,” she said. “They didn’t go to college and wait till their third year to want to switch majors.”
Not college versus trades
The panel also rejected the familiar college-versus-trades framing.
“It’s not an either-or,” Brana said. “Sometimes it’s both. I’m a skilled tradesperson and I have a master’s degree. I’m a University of Michigan alum.”
Trade careers involve education, but it may look different from the traditional four-year model: an apprenticeship, certification, a technical degree, employer training or classroom instruction combined with paid work. The distinction matters because it reshapes the financial calculation facing a teenager and family.
“Some people pay to go to college,” Brana said. “Some people get paid to go to college.” She described students in an auto program who work three days a week, attend school two days a week and are paid while they train. “That’s a big difference,” she said.
The gender barrier
For Dallas Sutton, a 17-year-old automotive student at Detroit’s Breithaupt Career and Technical Center, the stigma is also gendered.
Sutton said she was encouraged by her late grandfather, a mechanic and pastor, and by her early interest in cars. But she also recognized the rarity of seeing women like herself in the field. “How cool would it be to see someone who looks like me being a female mechanic?” Sutton said, before answering: “That would be really cool.”
Her reasons for learning automotive work are both personal and practical. She said she wanted enough knowledge to avoid being misled or overcharged when her own vehicle needs repairs, and to help other women do the same.
“As a woman, we’re pushed upon, ‘Oh, you don’t want to do the dirty work. Leave that to a man,’” Sutton said. “I’m going to fix my own car, and I’m going to buy my own parts, and I know how to do it myself. Just being independent and being a woman of color is very important.”
Travis argued that exposure needs to begin early, with career exploration, work-based learning and contact with employers while students are still forming their sense of what types of work belong to people like them.
“If you do not have a knowledgeable adult, that really trusted adult with you, then sometimes it’s hard for a student to see a pathway if they don’t have other examples around for them,” she said.
The skilled-trades shortage is commonly discussed as an economic problem — one of unfilled jobs, aging workforces and insufficient training capacity. This panel at Ford Pro Accelerate suggested it is also a status problem. The country depends on skilled workers to construct homes, repair vehicles, maintain infrastructure and operate increasingly complex industrial systems. But families, educators and institutions have not always conveyed that dependence as a source of dignity, opportunity or ambition.
Until that changes, the challenge will not simply be persuading more young people to enter the trades. It will be persuading the people who love them that doing so is not settling for less.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
