Empowering Young Minds

Help our youth begin to look at skilled trades with a fresh view.  Help them start to think about how buildings are constructed and the materials and tools it takes.    Talk about all the inner workings of a building – plumbing, electricity, support beams, etc.   Have them try to draw a blueprint or design the layout of their perfect home and then add details on how they would run wires and pipes. Look at all the angles on many of the hip roofs constructed today. (They certainly aren’t as simple as a barn roof anymore!) For roofing, talk about how shingles and even underlayment need to be laid so that water flows off correctly for the complex facets, like in a valley.  These conversations are vital as we instill value into the skilled trades as a respectable and well-paying career option.

Back 30 some odd years ago, the pressure was on for everybody to get out and go get a college education, get an office job. 

The computer revolution was taking off, and everybody was doing that. And vocational programs suffered as a result. They started getting put out to pasture.

As the cultural zeitgeist shifted, young people put less stock behind working with their hands and looked toward four-year college degrees for the promise of higher pay. The result? Student debt exploded more than sevenfold since the 1990s, but research shows college graduates still find it challenging to secure jobs in their chosen field. 

The booming demand in skilled trades — where salaries often exceed median U.S. worker pay by 30 percent or more — offers a promising new avenue for young people in search of steady work. But getting them interested requires a shift in mindset. 

We as a society haven't done a good job over the last 10 or 20 years of promoting skilled trades. You have these two factors of a somewhat negative perception of the skilled trades, coupled with ever-rising demand, and it creates a pretty profound worker shortage.

Funding for programs like Youth Agri-Trade Academy is a promising way to build a strong and steady pipeline of people entering skilled trades

According to Parag Chitnis, acting director of USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a recent report shows that students across America who are studying food, agriculture and related sciences made a “sound career choice and will graduate into a strong and growing job market in the years ahead.”

The USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Purdue University report shows that over the next five years, U.S. college graduates can expect about 59,400 job opportunities annually in food, agriculture, renewable natural resources and the environment. Employer demand will actually exceed the supply of available graduates with a bachelor’s degree or higher in agriculture-related fields.

While our high school agricultural education programs offer the base knowledge to help students get a strong start on a college degree and ultimately a career path, programs like FFA and Youth Agriculture-Trade Academy offer soft skills that often do not carry strong data. But they are what employers are looking for. 

For instance, Youth Agri-Trade Academy helps students understand collaboration in the workplace. Youth Agri-Trade Academy students learn to work as a group. They understand how to listen to others, share their opinions and even take criticism. They have one goal — to win. To do that, they must work together in a respectful manner.

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