Carhartt CEO warns schools are steering Gen Z students away from a lucrative career path: Skilled trades can pay 32% more

Corporate America is slowly waking up to a crisis facing America’s blue-collar workforce: There aren’t enough skilled workers to fill the jobs already available—and the gap is expected to widen.

About 1.7 million skilled-trades job openings are projected each year through 2035 as employers contend with both new demand, including the rapid build-out of data center infrastructure, and an aging workforce. But current training pipelines are producing just 55% of the skilled workers needed to fill those jobs.

That’s according to a new report from the Alliance for America’s Skilled Trades, a coalition formed earlier this summer by Ford, Carhartt, BlackRock and Google—and has since expanded to 14 other corporations, including Meta, Microsoft, and The Hershey Company.

But perhaps more troubling, according to Linda Hubbard, CEO of the 137-year-old workwear brand Carhartt, is what happens before workers ever enter the trades full-time: Too many students aren’t being given a clear path toward success. Fewer than half of people who start a trades apprenticeship finish it, while just 29% of starters are working in a trade within five years of leaving their apprenticeship.

“I can’t imagine how frustrating that would be to someone who really had all this enthusiasm to learn, goes into a program, and it’s just really not delivering what it needs to get them to success,” Hubbard told Fortune.

The skilled-trades pipeline starts long before the job site

Hubbard, who came from a blue-collar family, pointed to practical barriers, including a lack of reliable transportation and childcare, that can cause workers to drop out of training programs. But she also pointed to another problem that starts much earlier: the guidance students receive in school.

“We’ve been investing in high school training programs, but maybe we don’t have guidance counselors that are necessarily encouraging people to connect and explore a career in the skilled trades,” Hubbard said.

While 95% of counselors agree trade school is valuable and a credible post-high school option, just 54% say they often recommend vocational or trade school and only 28% often recommend an apprenticeship, according to the report.

“I would encourage just counselors to think about it more broadly: ‘What are the skills you need to develop and how those can be fulfilling in developing a lifelong career?’” Hubbard said.

For students, the appeal of the career can be both practical and financial. Many vocational programs provide on-the-job training, allowing workers to earn money while they learn to become an electrician, plumber, or HVAC technician. Skilled trades careers pay 32% more than other jobs that don’t require a college degree and offer a later path to entrepreneurship.

But the work comes with trade-offs, too: Beyond the long-standing stigma that skilled trades are less respected than white-collar careers, some jobs can be physically demanding and require significant travel as projects start and finish.

Hubbard hopes the new data and workforce alliance can be a first step toward improving the programs that prepare workers for the trades—and making sure more of them actually lead to successful careers.

The attention on skilled trades is something Mike Rowe has sought for decades

While the skilled trades are now catching the attention of many C-suite executives, it’s an issue Mike Rowe has been focused on for decades. Known for his TV show Dirty Jobs, Rowe has long argued that America has overlooked a huge class of essential jobs that don’t require a four-year degree.

“The basic argument was you got a couple million good jobs that don’t require a four-year degree that employers are struggling to fill,” Rowe told Fortune Daily. “The jobs are essential, but for whatever reason, they’re not lauded. They’re not celebrated, and most of them are out of sight and out of mind.”

Now, he said the stigma around the trades is colliding with surging demand for workers—from the construction of data centers to the expansion of the defense industrial base.

“There is a massive—it’s a knife fight in a phone booth—to get the talent that you need right now on a construction site,” he told Fortune’s Ellie Austin.

And those jobs can come with six-figure paychecks. Rowe recently spoke with three electricians working at a data center in Plano, Texas, he said, all under 30 and all earning more than $200,000 a year.

His advice to young people considering their career options was simple: “Pick the tires on everything,” Rowe said. “Look at all of it. Try not to get pulled into the inertia and the suppositions and the pre-existing ideas that a lot of well-intended people in your life might have.”

This story was originally featured on