Source: Fortune
Summary
Ford CEO Jim Farley criticized the default assumption that college is the only path for young people, highlighting the need for skilled trades. A report by the Alliance for America’s Skilled Trades, including Ford, BlackRock, and Carhartt, found that 1.7 million skilled trades jobs will open annually through 2035, but only 55 trained candidates are prepared for every 100 roles. Despite high interest from teens and parents, only 48 of 100 apprentices finish, and 29 are working in a trade five years later. The report emphasizes that the challenge lies not in recruitment but in completion and retention.
Our Reading
The numbers tell one story.
Ford pushes back on college as the only path.
1.7 million jobs need filling, but only 55 trained per 100.
Interest is high, but completion is low.
Employers control the destination, and it must pay enough to matter.
Author: Evan Null
Why People Walk Away
Finishing an apprenticeship isn’t cheap. Getting to class can mean a car payment or a two-hour bus ride, and childcare doesn’t pause for an apprenticeship. Ford’s new investment in getting trades students to class goes straight at one of these barriers, and that matters.
Other barriers are ones employers built. Apprentices earn little while they learn, and in some trades they carry costs that employers used to cover. Many auto technicians, for example, are paid a set rate per repair regardless of how long the job takes, and they buy their own tools. A new tech who is still learning works slower and absorbs the loss.
No awareness campaign fixes that. Employers control the destination, and a pathway only holds people if the destination pays enough to make finishing worth it.
What Finishing Looks Like
At the International Youth Foundation, we’ve spent more than a decade building automotive talent pipelines in Mexico and South Africa. One lesson keeps holding up. People finish when the training is built with the employers who will hire them.
In Mexico, we worked with automakers, suppliers, and coatings companies to design technical tracks in automotive painting, tool and die manufacturing, and automation. Then we embedded them across 28 campuses of the State of Mexico’s technical college system, so they would outlast any single grant. An evaluation of graduates from two of those tracks found 82% were employed within five to six months.
Teach the Job as It Is Now
Outdated training is another way we lose people. A graduate who learned last decade’s version of the job shows up unprepared, and either doesn’t get hired or doesn’t last. Matt Sigelman, whose Burning Glass Institute co-produced the report, said the jobs most resistant to automation are the ones built on varied, complex tasks that require human judgment. That means the training has to keep up with the work.
When electric vehicle manufacturing arrived in Mexico, we worked with the National Auto Parts Industry Association to define what the new jobs actually require, then built training around them. Industry defined the standard. Schools taught it.
What the Alliance Can Do Next
Ford and its partners have done the hard first step by measuring the problem, including how many people never finish. The next step is accountability. Every Alliance member should publish completion and five-year retention rates for the training programs it funds or runs, so we can see which ones actually get people to work. Employers should be inside public technical schools co-writing curriculum instead of building parallel programs on the side.
They should pay people while they learn and cover the tools the job requires. With DEWALT and Milwaukee Tool among the Alliance’s newest members, the companies that make those tools are now at the table, and that’s real progress. And the jobs at the end should pay a living wage.
The country doesn’t need to convince young people that the trades are worth it. They already believe it. Our job is to make sure the ones who say yes make it all the way to work.
