Careers
Find yourself. Or at least find a job.
Skilled Labor Careers
Are you ready to get your hands dirty?
Well…good. Because most of the population would rather keep their faces, arms, fingernails and…all other body parts…nice and tidy. Which should give you a leg up as you keep your nose to the grindstone and really put your back into it. (Okay, we’re all out of body part clichés for now.)
A skilled labor career is one that involves…well, manual labor. So…no filing receipts in color-coded folders. No taking meetings with heads of state. No passing out flyers to get passersby to come see your one-woman show. You scoff when someone talks about having an exhausting week entertaining clients. You just spent the last six days loading cargo containers onto a ship.
Most of us can live at least a month without our existential theory. But try doing the same with garbage collection during the hottest part of the summer. So yeah…while these guys may be underappreciated, they are definitely necessary.
It takes a special kind of person to want to spend their days below the earth in a coal mine, or below the streets in a sewer, or below just about every level of human dignity cleaning toilets at the Y. Usually, it’s simply someone who would rather work with their hands than with their mind. Either because there is not all that much going on upstairs, or because they find it more satisfying to be able to directly observe the physical fruits of their labor. Even if those fruits are…horse apples. And it’s their job to pick them up off Main Street.
However, not every skilled labor job is…janitorial in nature. Some require quite a bit of smarts, and some actually pay quite well. Aviation mechanics, for example, are no slouches. They might be rolling around in grease all day, but they can afford plenty of soap to clean themselves afterward—they make around $55k annually on average, and some make $80k or more. Truck drivers don’t do too badly either, pulling in $45-50k a year. It’s certainly not “retire at 35” money, but considering it doesn’t require a college education...not too shabby.
And as for opportunities in the various fields, there are expected to be even more spots to fill in coming years. Thanks to good ol’ shoddy American craftsmanship, stuff is breaking left and right (streets, buildings, bridges, you name it)...creating plenty of job openings for manual laborers to step right up and git ‘er fixed.
New technologies mean new prospects for laborers as well. There are now green collar occupations in addition to blue collar ones—people are needed to build wind turbines, install solar panels, and all sorts of similar jobs that will hopefully keep the human race alive for at least the next few decades.
To be frank, with the way the world has been changing, it’s starting to make quite a bit more sense to pursue a career in a skilled labor field. You’re starting out without any college loan debt, and potentially four years earlier than most of your peers. There’s a greater chance that the job you have to do won’t become obsolete due to technological advances, and working on an oil rig is definitely a great way to maintain that definition in your biceps without having to schedule time at the gym.