TRADE TALK | Blue Collar Wave

Can you feel the blue collar wave?

Over the last few years I’ve seen all of the attention turn to AI. It’s everywhere. Every news outlet, every podcast and every post on social media. New apps and tools for accounting, building websites, virtual assistants and system programming have been popping up everywhere I look. 

I can’t help but feel like all of this AI hype is drawing too much attention and leaving a huge opening for opportunities in other areas of the job market. 

While the AI trend booms, the blue collar sector was growing more and more opportunity. While on the job working as a Union Pipefitter, I started to think about what AI can’t do. It can’t climb into a pipe rack and repair a steam line that split from wear and tear. It can’t fix an emergency in a food plant that has shut down production and needs immediate attention by a group of Pipefitters and millwrights. It can’t rewire a natural gas pilot system for a glass furnace that needed to be retro fit and wired to accommodate components of the old system to work with the new equipment. 

The more I thought about this, the more I saw opportunity. With the average age of skilled tradesmen going up every year, the demand for skilled labor follows. And when something is in such high demand the money follows. I can only conclude that skilled labor will continue to gain momentum due to a perfect storm of AI taking over specific sectors of the job market, the age gap continuing to increase and the demand to keep America as a producer of products and energy. 

The biggest sector I see growing is data. If the AI boom continues it will need data centers. AI requires data centers to be built. That feeds laborers, brick layers, iron workers and sheet metal workers. These data centers need tons of power to supply equipment and servers that AI relies on. This would require endless amounts of electricians. These servers need cooling in multiple forms. From glycol systems to HVAC to keep the server rooms temperature controlled. Pipefitters would do most if not all of this piping and engineer these cooling systems. And hey facilities need clean water and plumbing which gives Plumbers tons of work as well. I think it’s safe to say the data sector will supply jobs across the country for all different trades for many years to come. 

The cherry on top is that data centers use so much power that contracts to build mini nuclear facilities are already in the works. Where there’s demand there’s lots of money. And since the United States as a whole is desperate to keep up with foreign countries in the AI race, money seems secondary to speed of production. 

My conclusion is that looking at the AI boom alone, the skilled trades will start to have such a demand that wages and opportunity are going to sky rocket. We are just at the beginning of a huge wave of blue collar job growth. These blue collar jobs will be the next great shift for someone to take the path of learning a trade and creating a great life with skills that AI can’t take. 

With that being said, SKIP COLLEGE. JOIN A TRADE. Let's keep building America. 

- Rob Weber