Could a skilled trade career be a better path for more students?

Kevin: Brian Hughes is the president of Hughes Environmental Engineering, one of the oldest and largest mechanical service providers in the New York City area. Beyond his current role, he also serves as senior vice president and treasurer of the Mechanical Contractors Association of America, which serves and supports over 2,600 mechanical service firms.

He began his career in the trades as a supervisor and location manager for Ryder Integrated Logistics. As the fourth-generation business owner and president, Brian joins us today to discuss career opportunities in the skilled trades for our youth. Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian: Hey, Kevin, thanks for this great invite.

Kevin: I tell you what, what you’re doing is so important, and I want to talk about the trades generally, but this idea of school to career has finally taken hold. A lot of people understand that while a college degree is important, there are a lot of skilled jobs out here that are available for young people.

Talk about the trades. But before that, Brian, how did you get into it? I know it was sort of a family business for you; you’ve been doing it for a long time, but you stuck with it.

Brian: Yeah, it’s an interesting question, Kevin. As you know, I have a bachelor’s degree from Williams College. I studied political science, but to go to college was not part of the plan to take over the family business.

My parents never had the benefit of a four-year college. They went directly to the workforce after high school. So, to send me to college was not to prepare me to enter the family business as the fourth-generation owner; it was to give me an opportunity to do something else so I didn’t have to go into that for lack of any other choices.

Kevin: Well, what changed? After going to college, you went against what their expectations were.

Brian: Yeah, they wanted to make sure that I had the educational background to go do anything, go in the corporate world, go do my own thing. But after working out in the corporate world for a Fortune 500 company for four years, I think I got frustrated with the bureaucracy and figured, “Maybe I give this thing a chance, and maybe I can run this business too,” and that was 25 years ago.

Kevin: Yeah, and you’re still doing it, and you said fourth generation. That doesn’t happen every day in America. Talk a little bit about the business, and really its roots, how it got started, and on top of all of that, Brian, how you’re able to maintain the business after all these years.

Brian: Yeah, well, thanks, Kevin. Really, the business started in 1935. My grandfather and great-grandfather during the Great Depression moved from Pittsburgh, where things were really, really bad, to New Jersey and New York, where things were only just really bad.

We started up this business and got into a new technology. Industrial refrigeration and air conditioning was invented, but it wasn’t mainstream, and the rest is history.

Kevin: How big is your business?

Brian: We have about 92 employees. About two-thirds of them are skilled tradespeople that work out in the field with tools. The other third of the business is a combination of administrative and white collar workers or people with blue collar skills that have been promoted over their career here.

Kevin: And when you talk about two-thirds are skilled tradespersons, what does that mean? And what type of skills are we talking about?

Brian: Great question, and we get that a lot. What exactly defines a skilled tradesperson? A good resource would be Indeed.com. Indeed lists 72 “skilled trades,” everything from automotive technician to carpet installer to pipe fitter, so anything where you’re using a combination of tools and your mind together to produce a benefit for people out there in the workforce.

Kevin: I love that description. It’s simple and straightforward. And I find that today’s young people in the schools that I visited can connect with that notion very well because they’re digital natives, and they understand this connection between the tools and the mind. How are you recruiting young people, or how do you recruit people, generally, to the business?

Brian: Well, it’s certainly one of our biggest challenges, Kevin. One of our biggest obstacles is in recruiting people to come into the trades as opposed to going to spend your money for a four-year college education.

And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with a college degree; I have one. But there seems to be a stigma out there that the trades are for people that are lesser educationally or don’t have certain capacities educationally, and that’s just not true.

In our world, when you talk about people, or what I do for a living, my industry, which includes things like plumbers, sheet metal workers, pipe fitters, welders, HVAC technicians: these are all essential jobs. And really, in a way, every day is a science experiment out there for your job. It’s cool to be out there working on stuff.

Kevin: Yeah, and I do think that’s the case. That’s why I mentioned earlier that a lot of kids today are drawn to it, because even in the video games of today, they’re trying to fix something or solve something. So, it’s more than just sitting in a classroom being lectured to and then spitting out what you memorize. It really is about active engagement.

And it’s interesting, because I was talking with Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, whose father was a welder, and he is big on the school to career and the traditional voc[ational] education, but he even talks about the fact that there are these misperceptions about the trades. How can we address that?

Brian: Yeah, and I don’t necessarily, Kevin, view it as a binary argument, where you must go to college, or you go to the trades. It can be a little bit of both.

Kevin: Yep.

Brian: And you go back to your comment about kids on video games, and you have listeners that might be parents out there: This is one employer that really encourages one video game that I love, and that’s Minecraft.

Kevin: Yeah.

Brian: Parents, do not pull Minecraft away from your kids. We love Minecraft because it teaches kids teamwork; it teaches them to produce efficiencies with limited resources, so we love kids that play Minecraft. That’s a video game that gets thumbs up in the trades.

Kevin: We love it too. In fact, in a lot of the schools that we run, we’ve integrated Minecraft into our curriculum. And other curriculum providers, school districts are doing the same thing.

You are active in the mechanical association, the trade association for folks in the trades. Talk a little bit about that work and how you all are trying to address this issue.

Brian: Sure, Kevin. Well, in addition to my day job as a small business owner, I am the senior vice president and treasurer of the Mechanical Contractors Association of America, we call it MCAA, which is an advocacy group for over 2,500 employers just like me.

I’m smaller; many are larger, and we employ over 100,000 skilled tradespeople in our craft. So 100,000 workers showed up on the job this morning to work for one of our member companies, and we advocate joining the trades, getting an apprenticeship, learning some skills that can be used throughout one’s career, and not going through the situation where you might have college debt hanging over you.

And one of the things that we like about it and we promote is that you could easily start a career in your early 20s and be mid-20s, late 20s, and be earning over $100,000 a year, not having any college debt, and already starting to save for your retirement, whereas most American young people don’t start saving until much later in life.

The skilled careers do more than just teach a skill that you could use to earn a weekly paycheck, but to build a foundation to leapfrog you ahead of some of your peers that you graduated high school with.

Kevin: You mentioned that the association is involved in advocacy. What are some of the challenges that they see when advocating among local and federal policymakers?

Brian: Well, certainly, we’re in favor of apprenticeships. We like vocational schools of all kinds. Anything that you can learn. Challenges. Obviously, we have challenges politically. We try to advocate for people that are earning hourly wages to reduce their debt, increase their skills, increase their mobility, protect their pensions and their benefits.

But it’s not just the politics and to advocate for what we’re looking for legislatively, but we also have people working against us that are trying to push people toward a college degree that might not necessarily need one.

And one of the things that when we work with educators, Kevin, we try to explain to them, “You may want to be a little bit more open-minded when you look at a child and say, ‘He’s not college material.’” And I’d like to offer maybe an alternative, more open-minded way of looking at things.

If you have a student that’s particularly artistic, for example, those types of kids might make great welders, for example, because yes, welding is a skilled craft, but it’s a little bit of artwork in there, and it looks really neat, and it takes a little bit of a creative mindset to be able to put two pipes together the right way.

Young people that are very good at math, for example, can be very excellent carpenters, because it’s all math in carpentry, or electricians, because there’s a lot of math that goes into being an electrician.

Sometimes when a student chooses a skilled trade, we often find that when they become good at something, the hints were there years ago, and we’re hoping that academia will be open-minded to the fact that some of these kids actually have some skills that we’re not seeing yet until we get out there and get them on the tools.

Kevin: Brian, I actually love that reference, because teachers are in a power position when it comes to influencing young people. And one thing that we have seen as we introduce career pathways to young people in middle school: It is one amazing engagement tool, oftentimes for the kids who are typically unengaged.

You introduce them to a pathway; they start working with teams: maybe they do something with their hands. It’s more than just sitting in a classroom for an hour and trying to take notes or pay attention. The long and short of it is, they’re more excited and engaged around learning, which is a win-win for everyone.

Brian: Yeah, and Kevin, we as employers are seeing that, too. When an 18-year-old young man or young woman, 18, 19 wants to come into an apprenticeship program, for example, they have to produce their high school transcript, and sometimes the grades aren’t there.

These could be students that are not, to use that hackneyed phrase, college material, but they might have Cs; they might be down in the lower ranking of their class, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to learn. That may mean that they don’t want to learn what they were being taught, but they do want to learn.

And one of the things we love about the skilled trades is that it’s not like you learn a trade and then you don’t go back to school anymore, or you learn to be an electrician, or you get your plumber’s license. These are lifelong learners, because as the technology advances, there are people that are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s that are still learning.

It’s kind of a culture of learning throughout the entire continuum of your career. You can’t just say, “Well, I learned how to do what I do, and now I’m good.” They learn throughout their career, not just to get a certificate or a piece of paper, and that’s what we love about the trades, is that we catch onto somebody that really does want to learn because they get excited about it.

Like I said, for some of these young people, they didn’t like science class that much, but when they come get a job in a trade like ours, every day is a science experiment, and every day is a field trip, and they love it. They love it.

Kevin: Yeah. One other thing, you mentioned the advocacy work that you’re doing with MCCA, and we talked a little bit about the politics, but in spite of the crazy nature of today’s politics, this is one area where folks on both sides of the political aisle tend to find agreement.

What are some of the things that can be done to jumpstart the awareness?

Brian: One area of common ground for working people — and I’m talking about the shower after work crowd, not the shower before work crowd, working people — we legislatively need to remove every possible barrier in front of these people in order to make them succeed for themselves and their families and their communities.

We are in the barrier removal business, not in the obstacle placing business, and most of the people would agree that we need to be removing every barrier possible to these people.

Last week I had a chance to meet Mike Rowe, and most of your listeners will know Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel. And Mike Rowe made a very interesting comment, which I thought was prescient. He said, “We continue to loan money to students that can’t pay it back, to train them for jobs that don’t exist any longer.”

And that was very interesting, because it’s not a political comment, necessarily, but you read around, Kevin, that these technology companies can shed 100,000 jobs, and yet there are 11 million unfilled jobs in our nation that people like me can’t find skilled people for, can’t find skilled workers.

So, you hear talk about the labor shortage. I don’t know that there’s a labor shortage, Kevin. I do think that there is a mismatch in skills where there are too many people being pushed to jobs that don’t require what they’ve been trained for and not enough people coming into what the economy really needs.

So my message to academia, what’s being offered to us is not exactly a good fit for what we’re looking for. And collectively, we have to get together to make some changes to improve not only what we’re looking for for our society, but also for the individual worker that’s coming out of school and coming into businesses like mine.

Kevin: And in terms of this idea of where you find workers, that’s why the power of the schools is so important, because we know that many young people who are graduating from schools, from colleges with debts, are pushed into certain areas of work. And even young kids who may be graduating from high school, who don’t go to college, aren’t aware of the skilled trade opportunity. They may end up going into the food service industry or the retail industry.

How do we break that paradigm? Because exposure’s everything. And does your association work with schools? Work with some of the providers out there who have apprenticeship programs? Because I do think that we need to integrate more of what the schools are doing with the opportunities that folks in your world are offering.

Brian: Yeah, that’s true. Our association believes very strongly in apprenticeship programs. They do work. That work-study model where you’re getting plenty of time in front of the chalkboard, but you’re also out there using your hands, putting what you’ve learned in a classroom environment and putting it to use practically — we believe in that work-study combo. That really seems to be the best model.

Kevin: One of the things, as I was looking at the trades, that has come up, and I know you and the association have worked with this, is this perception that the trades are a male-dominated area, and that there’s been a big push to make sure that young girls and women know that they have a role in being able to develop skills to work in the trades.

Brian: Absolutely. Part of removing the stigma of who belongs what and where, the ultimate goal is to be satisfied and have the choice of what you want to do, and all of the building trades in particular, which I could speak to, sheet metal workers, electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters, welders have done a great job opening the door and explaining to young women, “You don’t have to go down these three paths that perhaps you thought were the most ideal for somebody like you.”

So when there are a lot of job openings, then the flag is waved and everybody is invited in. So, all of our workforces look a lot more diverse, not only with male-dominated, female-dominated, but people who don’t speak English as a first language, first-generation immigrants. We’ve got some great, great people that have come into all of our trades.

Kevin: One thing that we’ve seen is, and you alluded to this, that a lot of young people are graduating from high school, and they may not necessarily have gotten the skills that they need. They didn’t go to college, and they may even have a hard time adjusting or getting into the skilled trade field.

But now there are these adult learning programs where adults are making career changes. They may go to a STEM bootcamp, or they may go to some other type of skilled trade apprenticeship program. How does that fit in for those who maybe have finished their education, are stuck in a dead end job, and there’s still room for them to develop some of the skills necessary to get employed as a skilled trade worker?

Brian: Yeah, great observation. The typical tradesperson doesn’t necessarily start their career at 18, 19 years old anymore. We get lots of people in their 20s, early 30s. We recently hired a 42-year-old apprentice that basically had a 20-year career totally unrelated to what we do, but wasn’t quite satisfied with his vocation in life, and he’ll spend the next 20 years hopefully with our company.

It’s never too late. You shouldn’t have any regrets about what you do. And if you think that you’ve made the wrong decision or you’re not 100% satisfied in what you do, I can tell you, I’m a testament to that, that the trades will be open-minded to older people that are looking for a different way of life.

And something where you don’t feel fulfilled in an office or a cube, there are lots of opportunities, and there is no better time than now.

Kevin: Yeah. When it comes to schools being more open and making the adjustments to allow for apprenticeship programs, I have heard employers say in the trades field that some school bureaucracies can be a barrier to even getting good apprenticeship programs in place.

Now, I think many schools are making sure that they are making the necessary adjustments to work through those challenges, but what advice would you give to schools that are considering working with some businesses, developing apprenticeship programs? How can they make that easier for the companies?

Brian: Well, one thing is to reach out. We recognize that not everybody has a vehicle by which to reach out to employers like us, but we do have associations that are open-minded, and we will do the work. We will come to you. We have the resources. We will come speak for any schools that will let us in and have an audience, even for 15 minutes, for some of the kids in your classroom that might be open-minded to our message.

One of the things that we need as a society, Kevin, to break down is that there’s a false premium placed on a four-year college degree, and particularly in some of our more upscale communities. There’s lots of self-congratulation on their 99% college placement rate.

But what they don’t tell us is how many kids came back after Thanksgiving and said, “Mom, Dad, this is not for me.” We don’t ever get that stat about how many don’t make it through that first year of school, and we want to get out in front of them so those kids don’t waste that year. You hear things about a gap year, Kevin, right?

Kevin: Oh yeah, yeah.

Brian: That’s something that we hear a lot of, post-pandemic: a gap year. That’s a great time to look around and maybe take a test drive for something where you might work with your hands. Even if you wind up going to college down the road, that’s okay.

I have three kids, and two of them are in college, but they also know how to drive a forklift, and they know how to operate a commercial vehicle, making deliveries through New York City. Again, it’s not mutually exclusive, but you need to appreciate the trades, and maybe they’ll have some opportunities to do what they want, whether they have a college degree or not.

Kevin: So I have one last question, Brian. This is what I really want to know. For many people who are in the trades — you mentioned plumbers, welders, and the like — folks call on them when they need something, or they may be behind the scenes. You mentioned operating a forklift, doing the work that needs to be done to make things go and make business work.

What makes for a successful career in the trades? What do you feel makes them successful and feel successful?

Brian: Well, that’s a very easy question, and the common denominator for all tradespeople that I find, and this is everybody from automotive technician to carpet installer to plumber, is they have a burn to learn. There’s something in the DNA that they’re always learning.

It’s like a nonstop circular education where you learn how to do something, and then you get better at it. You learn more; the technologies change. Five years into your trade, you need to get a new skill set. It’s not like you learn to do one thing, and you never go back in the classroom again.

And people that are in the skilled trades have this culture of learning. They’re always watching YouTube videos, reading books, keeping up with the new technology. And I find that the best tradespeople, and not “best talented,” not best “earn the most money,” but best “love their job;” they’ve just got a passion for continued learning.

Long after the classroom stops, the learning continues on the job, and that’s what really makes them very happy with what they do.

Kevin: Well said. Brian Hughes, thank you so much for all you do, and thank you for joining us on What I Want to Know.

Brian: Hey, great having me, Kevin. Catch up soon.

Kevin: All right. Thanks for listening to What I Want to Know. Be sure to follow and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, so you can explore other episodes and dive into our discussions on the future of education, and write a review of the show.

I also encourage you to join the conversation and let me know what you want to know using #WIWTK on social media. That’s #WIWTK. For more information on Stride and online education, visit stridelearning.com. I’m your host, Kevin P Chavous. Thank you for joining What I Want to Know.