Soften your senses.
Ways to become a better speaker, listener, and follower.
Learn more about Explore the Trades at explorethetrades.org.
If we think about the trades that a lot of us grew up into, it was because of experiences
that we had in life.
I mean, as a kid, a lot of us worked on things that we didn't really always know exactly
what we were doing, but we enjoyed tinkering with things.
And as we evolved, some of us ended up finding jobs out in the field.
A lot of us went to college just to get to college like myself and go, I don't know
that this is really me.
I love learning, but man, I really miss working on stuff.
And some of us as kids that worked on things ended up being older kids that continued working
on things and found ourselves in the trades, in a variety of different trades, right?
So if we could have looked back in time and prepared for some of these jobs, where would
we be in life?
A lot of us didn't find exactly our home in the industry until later once we were very
experienced and had some opportunities to learn a little bit about life.
Well, what if we had opportunities along the way to scope where we were going?
Technicians in today's industries, in the trades, in HVAC and plumbing and electrical
are pursuing different avenues than many of us did.
We were there to fix a lot of things.
Now a lot of our younger generation are looking at the world going, I really want to make
a difference.
And there are changes in technology that have made these roles so much more significant
and you can have such an impact on the environment that we live in.
So we're really anxious to be able to discuss the trades and discuss how to promote the
trades to bring in some of these bright young talent into our programs.
So Kate, thank you so much for joining us today.
And let's learn a little bit about what Explore the Trades is doing for our industry because
it is a big deal.
And it's something that we didn't have.
We didn't have the advocacy like this 20, 30 years ago for sure.
Yeah.
Well, thank you for having me.
This conversation will be a lot of fun.
Absolutely.
We're a team.
So just to give you a little bit of background about Explore the Trades, we're a nonprofit
with our sole focus of bridging the technical talent gap to the service trades of plumbing,
heating, cooling and electrical.
So that's what we do.
So really our focus is really to promote the trades.
And I think Explore the Trades is positioned in such a unique spot where we have the opportunity
to really fill in that foundational information, to really tell everybody, specifically students
and educators and parents, really tell the story of why someone would consider these
industries for a career out of high school and really how they play into our everyday
lives.
So the example I can use that I think about the most is how many students are out there
or adults for that matter, where you go into your kitchen and you turn the light on and
you don't even think about the work and all the things that go along with that.
You know, and just how does everything incorporate into our daily lives?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
When we think about trades from the perspective of 30 years ago, they didn't have the technologies
that we have.
They didn't have the esteem that we have in today's generations.
There was a time where the trades were kind of looked down as, well, if you're not going
to succeed in college, this is a path you can go because you can still make pretty good
money working on some toilets and working on some drains and running some wire and maybe
hooking up some cable and maybe working on a furnace or an air conditioner, which were
all built very similar at the time.
And that is nothing similar to that.
I can think about some of the electricians now that are getting into things like solar
voltaic and technologies that weren't even thought of a generation or two ago to be a
really well suited career to look into.
Right.
Yeah.
I think with all of these systems that come into our homes and our workplaces every day,
you think about everything that really separates us from a third world country, clean water,
you know, indoor air quality, electricity.
We just we forget about that every day and we take it for granted.
Yeah, absolutely.
We do.
All right.
So let's tell us a little bit about how we are affecting the trades and how that transition
can help our educational institutions.
We have a lot of educators that will be joining us today wanting to learn more about how do
I even market?
How, who do I start the conversations with?
Sure.
So primarily, like I mentioned just a couple of minutes ago, the main demographic to whom
we are speaking would really be that K through 12 audience, educators, school counselors,
and parents again, to set the stage of what these careers have to offer.
And I think in your intro, Clifton, you know, seeing all the pictures of those kids playing
outside and playing with tools, you know, I think we have to remember that because the
generations have changed so much that a lot of the students right now who would be in
middle school, high school, they don't know what they don't know.
So exposure, right?
So if mom and dad aren't working on stuff at home, they're not going to see that either.
So that's where we can come in to really set the stage to let them know all of the opportunities
that would exist out here.
So a lot of the work we do, again, we're focused on that school audience.
We're focused on really adding filters to these trades to say, hey, let's talk about
STEM.
And I know we'll talk about that in a little bit.
Yeah, absolutely.
And how the trades fall under STEM, talking about the career growth that's possible.
You know, as soon as you finish high school and you start your apprenticeship, let's think
about all of those career mile markers that you can achieve in these industries.
So not only being a technician, but going into being a service manager and other leadership
and potentially sort of that entrepreneurship role that comes into play.
Yeah.
There are a lot of technicians, once they get out in the field, you know, they think,
oh, well, this is a good way for me to be able to have my own business someday.
And it's a small percent that do, but the ones that develop to that point, it takes
all of that experiential investment over the time to be able to run your own business.
Not like you could go in and work for a year or two and start your own business.
There's a lot involved with that, many aspects of education.
Yeah, absolutely.
So again, we just, we really want to talk to those adults and those education professionals
who would have the opportunity to influence a lot of those conversations at the school
level.
Okay.
So, and you're also working with contractors and now how does that play along?
Do you have the ability to influence contractors to have input on some of these educational
programs?
Yeah.
So a lot of the, a lot of the information we have online, and I'm sure we'll look at that
in a little bit as well.
And a lot of the content that we have available for download from our website, available by
request, a lot of that content came out of conversations with contractors who would call
and say, Hey Kate, I'm going to a career fair.
What do you have that I could use to help tell the story?
So that's really how all of these came to be to say, what are some of the basic questions?
What are the most asked questions about being in the trades?
And that's how we assembled it.
So a lot of the content we have are used, is used by contractors at high school fairs,
recruiting events.
So we have a lot, there's a lot of, I would say play with a lot of those.
Okay, definitely.
Cause I've always wondered how, how many of those call in your name might even be able
to have some aspect on that.
Do we get very many contractors calling in asking what the paths and what the opportunities
are for students?
Oh, absolutely.
All of the time, especially at that high school level, we're talking to instructors that are
looking for, you know, how do I encourage my students from going from my high school
exploratory program where we're touching on multi, you know, we're touching on a little
bit of air conditioning, some heating, some plumbing to really choose a pathway to go
and further their, their career and their, their studies beyond that high school level.
Absolutely.
The way we wanted to sort of design the website is depending on the demographic that you fit
into, absolutely your way to get into the questions that you would like answered.
Who am I and what resources do you have for me?
That's exactly right.
You got it.
Very cool.
A lot of the information.
So over last year, we had the chance to host a couple of webinars specifically geared towards
high school educators and middle school educators and school counselors to say, Hey, let us
educate the educators.
You know, what sort of information can they have in their back pocket when they're talking
with their students and really thinking about what that path might look like after high
school.
And we were able to pull some labor statistics in terms of, you know, growth that we're expecting
for the next handful of years in the trades.
We have about three to 4% of women who are in the workforce right now, which is slowly
increasing and really trying to break down the stereotypes where, you know, well, you're,
you're not smart enough to go to college.
Or quote unquote, just a plumber where we could easily dispel that myth to say, well,
you know, the apprenticeship is 8,000 hours and they're hands on training, you know, so
there's a lot of equipment and technologies.
Exactly.
There's a number of ways to sort of change that perspective.
Yeah.
And I've seen that personally grow just from the social media side.
So on a channel that I had a couple of years ago, I used to do a similar kind of content
and I always kept about a one to 1.3 to 1.5% female audience.
And that was pretty consistent with a lot of other people that was in that realm.
I could tell you that in this last six months, we are hovering around 3% females for our
social content, which shows us that we have just in a short period of time started moving
into that 3 and 4% female workers in the trades.
And we're starting to see a lot more doing social broadcasting, showing what the trades
look like from the female perspectives.
And that is really developing into a growing trend and it needs to be grasped.
Because if you think about a lot of the educators, a lot of the educators out there have been
like guys like me who grew up in the trades and this is what you did.
And when you get done, hopefully you get out of the field and you do some training.
But then how do you approach young ladies to be involved with a trade that you may not
even be good at communicating to young ladies to begin with?
So there's a learning curve for educators to be able to approach this women in the trades
properly.
And it's a huge door that as this opens is going to open up new avenues for both educators
and for our youth as well.
Not even just for the female demographic, for all demographics coming into the trades.
All the trades break off into so many different pathways.
It's not just the hot, sweaty technicians that are up on the roof.
You've got analytics, you've got controls, you've got so much automation and cool technology
nowadays that it isn't the same as what we were taught that these trades were many, many
years ago.
So yeah, yeah.
I recently spoke with a contractor out in San Diego and the owner has a handful of women
serving as HVAC technicians.
And the owner explained to me that they are probably the most booked out technicians on
staff.
You know, once they have that customer base, it's full.
But they were also sharing with me that when you think about it, and I think these are
attributes maybe more for females, but depending on what you're working on with your fingers,
female fingers tend to be smaller and it's just sort of that the ability to establish
that rapport with the homeowner.
Oftentimes it would be a woman at home answering the service call.
So immediately there's that trust that can be built, attention to detail.
So there's a lot of intangible traits that I think are really way in our favor actually.
I keep hearing the same thing from contractors that they wish they had 10 women for everyone
that they've hired because of the customer support, because that's a whole nother topic
that we'll do on some shows is the customer service side of being a technician.
When you're interacting with people, a lot of times, us guys aren't the best conversational
people when we're out working in the field.
We have to learn how to communicate.
It really does offer a lot of interesting opportunities.
When you're talking about how so many of the different avenues of our trade are never really
discussed, we have this envision of Uncle Bob the plumber with a beer belly and can't
keep his shirt tucked in and Uncle Joe that's electrician that can barely climb the telephone
pole.
We have all of these misperceptions of the industry.
I remember having a conversation too many years ago with a young guy in his late 20s
and we were talking about being in the HVAC industry and he worked on cooling units that
were on the sides of telecommunication buildings.
He worked on these on remote mountaintops and islands because they couldn't find technicians.
So he was an outdoors person very much into hunting and just enjoyed being out in nature
and he was an air conditioning technician that would fly out on a helicopter, get dropped
in these remote mountaintop places where he could work on air conditioning equipment that
was there and he would go in for two or three days and stay for a day or two and just be
on the side of the mountain.
I said, man, how do you find a gig like that?
He said, we can't find anybody to fill the jobs.
I was like, wow, there's very interesting jobs in our industry that people are unaware
of and doing things like this, talking about the opportunities, talking about how HVAC
is not this.
HVAC is unbelievably big.
Electrical is not this anymore.
It's got so many opportunities.
Plumbing is not just a small window of opportunities.
It is technology that is moving at the speed of every other industry.
I have a buddy that was a chiller technician on one model of chiller.
So he was like the best technician at that model and all he did was waited for the phone
call to come from an embassy and he would hop on a flight to go work on a chiller anywhere
around the world.
And that was his gig.
And so there are so many opportunities in our industry and we just need to be open to
the thought that it's not a little job anymore.
It's an abundance of opportunities.
Yeah.
So, I mean, speaking of women in the trades, when we were sharing all of this information
with the teachers and school counselors, you know, in that spirit of really understanding
the history behind it, you know, we were able to share a few facts about Lillian, who was
the first master plumber, first female master plumber in the fifties.
And so, you know, when you, when you think back, it's, this isn't anything new.
I mean, this was, you know, 70 years ago.
So it's just really interesting to sort of uncover history a little bit to share that
with everybody.
Yeah, it really is.
And I'm a history buff.
So you're, you're speaking my language right now.
One of the most interesting conversations I have ever had at one point in my career,
I was working on some equipment at a retirement community here in Indiana and I was carrying
on some conversation with a little old lady that was there, just as, just an amazing individual.
We started talking about what she did for a career.
She said, well, you could probably enjoy this.
I wired instrument panels for B-52 bombers during the war.
And I went, you did what?
She said, yep.
She says I was a small enough person.
There wasn't a man that could get under that dash.
So I wired the dash for every B-52 that came out of the plant.
Man, we, we have really, really started to start sparking conversations on opportunities.
Here we go.
Yeah.
So another step that we have pulled in sharing, you know, one of the reasons why people should
consider the trades after high school is that just the amount of student loan debt.
I mean, you look at the number and you can't even fathom $1.73 trillion in student loans
carried by everyone in the United States right now.
So I think that's an easy, that's an easy message to share.
And you can start an apprenticeship and start to earn a wage.
I've witnessed that firsthand myself.
With kids going to school, there's a big difference on that kind of debt that you come.
My own son, he was able to, fortunate to be able to do firefighting through his junior
and senior year of high school and then continued on to finish up his degree afterwards versus
friends that didn't start in high school.
They didn't start until after they got out of high school.
Many of them are still in school.
And you know, it's made a big difference in his life and the way that he looks at his
future and a career.
Yeah.
Big numbers to talk about there.
Yeah.
And another thing, you know, when we, when we talk about, especially to that educator
audience, you know, really thinking about, okay, why do technicians love what they do?
And so we just put up some of the top five answers that we would repeatedly get, you
know, and I think that all revolves around the same theme of really being community minded
in that, you know, that someone in the neighborhood, the water heater went out or, you know, whatever
that job might be, but really having the critical thinking skills to diagnose the issue.
Here's how we're going to problem solve, you know, and really communicate with the homeowner
that way.
But, you know, when other aspects of, you know, earning potential, helping the environment,
I think Renee mentioned earlier with all of the technology that's in there now, you know,
there's so many devices to help with water conservation, energy conservation, you know,
there's a whole, you know, toolbox full of those.
And you know, I think with those technicians, once you have that skill set, you can really
go anywhere.
I mean, an embassy for Pete's sake, I never would have thought about that.
But you know, that's that opens up a whole new door of careers.
I think our younger generation, well, I know that they are younger generations are very
interested in making an impact on the world that they live in.
Yeah, I was, I was recently read an article from Pew Research and they were spotlighting
Gen Z for a number of reasons, but when it really got down to societal and cultural things
to think about, the climate was right at the top of the list.
And we, our industry has a really strong case to say, you come into HVAC or plumbing or
electrical, what a great way to really help the environment again, with all of those devices
that we can use.
Kate, I want to just thank you for being here with us and telling us all about Explore the
Trades and all the tools and resources available, not only just for our educators, but for people
that are looking to get into the trades, they now have some place to a resource to utilize
to find more details and really learn more about these things.
So thanks for the resources you have.
And thanks for your time today.
We appreciate it so much.