Mike O’Connor: Lose the university snobbery — a trade will make you rich

Despite being a lucrative career, there is still a stigma to trades. When will young people grow up and realise going to university equips you for little more than stacking supermarket shelves, writes Mike O’Connor.

My father once said, in assessing my manual skills, that I was so uncoordinated that he seriously doubted I could hammer a nail into a bar of soap.

This may have been a harsh judgment but it was an accurate one for while I inherited his intolerance of fools and hypocrites, he singularly failed to pass on a single gene containing his tradesman’s skills.

It was obvious, then, that were I to pursue a career handling power tools, climbing ladders and working with electricity, it would be a short and painful one.

Too many school leavers, however, have dismissed a career as a “tradie” because they have been pushed into taking a university degree by teachers and parents.

“Going to uni” has become the default setting. Parents don’t encourage their children to take up a trade because they do not regard it as being socially acceptable.

Congratulations, son. You’re now qualified to work at Woolies. Picture: iStock

What would their friends say if Little Johnny was to become a carpenter or a plumber? They might think he was too dumb to “go to uni” and that would never do.

It’s a widespread mindset and it has been thus for decades. Parents whose kids do trades are almost apologetic for this choice while those whose children are doing a degree say smugly that Little Johnny is “going to uni.”

Universities have become degree factories which will happily take money from anyone who can get a HECS loan and sign them up for a course which is as non-specific as it is non-challenging.

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These kids then spend three very pleasant years wandering the cloisters of academe. When their time is up, they are ejected onto the streets clutching a piece of paper which qualifies them for a part-time job stacking the shelves at Woolies.

They have been conned into thinking that when they emerge blinking into the harsh light of the real world, employers will queue for the privilege of employing them because they have “been to uni.”

The employers of course, know better. They’ve been burnt before by hiring people with grand sounding but useless degrees and decline to hire them.

Confused and disillusioned, they end up saddled with a HECS debt to the government and taking unsatisfying and unrewarding jobs which they could have taken three years ago when they left school.

It’s a scam and it continues to flourish today.

Carpentry apprentice Georgia Griffiths, 19, has a bright future. Picture: Zak Simmonds

The school leaver who pursues a trade, meanwhile, has skills which propel him into employment and is set upon a career path which has any number of possibilities which are his or hers to explore and exploit.

State and federal governments have done little to change this sad misdirection of our nation’s talent and it is to the credit of Federal Employment Minister Michaelia Cash that she is establishing a $1.5 billion Skilling Australians Fund designed to attract more people to apprenticeships.

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The government’s research shows that 31 of the 50 best paid occupations are held by people who did vocational training rather than a degree.

Parents and teachers need to abandon the job snobbery that has prevailed for too long. They do their children and students a great disservice and condemn them to careers which in many cases will lack a sense of fulfilment.

One of my old schoolmates left school in Year 10 and did a trade. He likes to recall, as he cracks a coldie on the deck of his $2 million boat, how his teachers told him not bother going on to Year 12 because he was too dumb.

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