Psychology vs A Skilled Trade

.

Nowadays, you hear about the lack of available jobs. However, I recently read that there are hundreds of thousands of jobs to be filled, if only the applicants had a skill.

Here, I could get into why Germany is and has been an industrial power, but the answer is simple: APPRENTICESHIP.   Read my book.

When I first came to this country, people then, and still today, hold there nose when one mentions a "Trade School". The simple reaction to the word Vocational School is, "My precious child is going to college!"

I ask you to read the statistics and see that nearly 3/4 of young folks do not graduate from a college. And even if the HS graduate gains a degree what MARKETABLE SKILL did the child gain? And further more, ponder this, what did it cost the parents? Or how much of a student loan has he or she hanging around the neck when the real life begins and they are looking to find employment?

The following is a true story which has played itself out over the last twenty-five years.


Back in the early 80s, I asked the then Bedford Educational Center's principal to send me a fellow who'd be at work everyday and wanted to learn a trade. (BEC is a high school trade school / Vocational School)

Twenty years later the man still worked for us. He was head pressman, operating a million dollar printing press, and making over twenty dollars an hour. When he first started, he bought himself a functional truck and began saving toward the purchase of a good sized piece of land. A few years later, after paying off the land, he had a large pond built on his property. With pond and land payed off, he had enough collateral to apply for a construction loan to build him a log cabin.

The man was an exemplary employee, steady as a rock, and so was his income. Week after week, year after year, he took home a paycheck; . . . for over twenty years. Three weeks vacation, retirement, holidays, overtime. . .

His house is paid off. . . No mortgage, . . . no student loan payments.

When the man turned forty years old, he quit his job. A total shock to the company.

The reason was, he did not want to work shift work. Although he had seniority, we could not give him preferential treatment. Everyone in the plant was asked to work shift work.

He left on good terms and we still speak and kid around whenever we meet.

He now works part time, days only, for ten dollars an hour; happy with his life. He grows a big garden, hunts all he wants, fishes out of his pond, looking ahead to see when he should cash in his retirement.

                                            Thank God for America!


And then there was the dude with a psychology degree driving a delivery truck in downtown Newark.


.