‘We value the skill, but maybe not for my child’: The stigma against blue-collar jobs, laid bare

The contradiction at the center of America’s skilled-labor shortage was distilled into nine words at Ford Pro Accelerate, the Blue Oval’s giant workforce-development event in Detroit.

“We value the skill, but maybe not for my child,” said Chelle Travis, executive director of SkillsUSA, a national workforce-development organization focused on students in career and technical education.

That tension—respect for the work but lingering resistance to seeing it as an aspirational future for one’s own children—surfaced repeatedly during Travis’ panel. Students, educators, social-media creators and industry advocates described a culture that continues to treat college as the default marker of success, even as employers seek more technicians, mechanics, builders and other skilled workers.

“We don’t really have a value problem, but we have a knowledge and really a connection problem,” Travis said. “Students and parents still do not know about all the opportunities, those family-sustaining wage opportunities for students. And it’s still seen as, ‘It’s not for me’ or ‘It’s not for my child.’”

Derek Feldmann, managing director at the Ad Council Research Institute, who partnered with Ford on a massive survey on young people’s attitudes toward the trades, said the research found a disconnect between what young people say they want from a career—financial stability, fulfillment and advancement—and how few identify the trades as a route to those goals.

Just 11% of the students surveyed were genuinely interested in pursuing trade careers, Feldmann said, even though 38% said they would consider one. “If we were to tell our 18-year-olds and 17-year-olds, ‘What does the path to college look like?’ They’ll repeat things like, ‘You apply, you then go for four or five or six years, you then exit and you get a job,'” Feldmann said. “The same thing even for military service. You go to basic training, you go do these kinds of things. And you start to ask, what about the trades?........

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