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........

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