‘You can earn a decent amount’: Ash has a commerce degree. But now he’s a tradie

This story is part of the May 17 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

Can’t get a tradie? It’s your fault. Mine, too. We are job snobs, too many of us: not just young people, but their parents and grandparents alike. And it’s an attitude that’s leading Australia into deep, hot water no plumber can control.

Over the past few years, I’ve had a few urgent jobs around the house that I couldn’t find anyone to fix. Troublesome plumbing problem. Semi-risky electrical fault. As for a roofer, I’m bloody lucky my son-in-law’s good mate is in the trade. Sound familiar?

Forty years ago, experts told us the shortage of tradespeople would only be temporary. In April 1999, when thousands of roofs in Sydney were destroyed in one terrifying hailstorm, we knew for real there was a problem. Those roofs became a patchwork of blue tarps for weeks and months, even years, as people waited in exasperation for tradies to stop the rain from pouring in. In Victoria’s Black Summer inferno of 2019-20, more than 400 homes were lost in just a few weeks. In the Biblical floods that swept across the Northern Rivers region of NSW in 2022, more than 4000 homes were left uninhabitable and thousands more seriously damaged. The floods and fires keep coming. Western Australia’s wheatbelt. Vast areas of Queensland underwater. We can – and we must – prepare for increasing extreme weather, with tradespeople being an essential part of rebuilding efforts, but we don’t have nearly enough of them to cope with the current housing crisis, let alone wild cards in the future.

The labour demands of major infrastructure projects, from the Melbourne Metro Tunnel to the new Sydney Fish Market, to the Northern Territory Art Gallery to preparations for the Brisbane Olympics in 2032, are also draining trades talent away from the residential sector. Notes Mark Hawkins, executive head of learning, teaching and construction at TAFE NSW: “For me, the challenge is exacerbated because within the construction industry itself, just in three streams alone – residential housing, the transition to net zero, infrastructure – there is internal competition all for the same resources.”

As venerated Australian businessman and University of NSW chancellor David Gonski noted in a recent podcast: “There are many, many people who believe that everyone should go to university … If you are the best plumber, the fact that you didn’t do urology at the university should not worry you at all – and particularly when there’s a plumbing problem.”

Politicians can throw billions of dollars at new builds, but money alone can’t lay bricks and erect timber frames. According to Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA), in the last quarter of 2024, two-thirds of recruiting employers across the country had vacancies for tradies that took at least a month to fill. There were shortages across every critical trade – electricians, plumbers, roofers, carpenters and bricklayers. One of the signature policies Labor took to the recent election, free public TAFE – as celebrated by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in his May 3 victory speech – is aimed at easing this skills deficit.

We can get by without a marketing executive or an accountant but not without an electrician, plumber or roofer.

Master Builders Australia (MBA) estimates we need 130,000 construction workers to meet the goal of more than one million new homes in four years. In April this year, MBA revealed we are now 160,000 homes short of the National Housing Accord target. We’ll need 42,500 extra electricians by 2030,
according to Michael Wright, national secretary of the Electrical Trades Union. There are already 188,000, but he says that’s not enough. In March, there were about 2800 unfilled jobs for electricians, according to the Internet Vacancy Index. There are 98,600 registered plumbers, with 1200 vacancies, as of March (these figures don’t include employers who don’t advertise but still need staff).

The chronic shortage of tradies is also compounding some less-than-ideal practices in the building industry. With fewer, or less-skilled tradespeople working on major building sites, developers are cutting corners to reduce costs, resulting in a scourge of often serious defects, particularly in apartment blocks (from failed waterproofing to severe cracking in foundations and facades). Last month, The Sydney Morning Herald revealed that hundreds of tradies in NSW had bought forged qualifications from a criminal syndicate in Sydney – and worryingly, this may only be the tip of the iceberg.

JSA commissioner Barney Glover knows better than anyone the urgent need to shift Australian perceptions of vocational education. As he sees it, a qualification as an electrician or plumber isn’t valued in the same way as a law or marketing or IT degree. But if we learnt anything during the pandemic, it was that we can get by without a marketing executive or an accountant but not without an electrician, plumber or roofer. Yet we still want our kids to enter university for a white-collar profession, even if they frequently wind up earning lower wages than they would have had they taken up a trade.

Glover wants to influence the prime influencers of children – their own parents. Not all kids are suited to university life, but many parents persist in seeing tertiary education as the only pathway “to having a great life, to having health and wellbeing, to having all of the positive things that people need to experience in a lifetime”. Opening up a wider range of job possibilities for kids becomes especially important “in that crucial moment in their teens when they are tossing up, ‘What am I going to do with my life? What do my options look like?’ ” Glover says we need a “parity of esteem” – when vocational education is regarded as being as valuable as a university degree. But we don’t have that in Australia.

The 66-year-old practises what he preaches. His three kids all have trades: bricklayer, electrician and motor mechanic. His grandson also just finished his electrician apprenticeship. He’s clearly pleased with his own contribution to ending the skills shortage.

Parents have a huge – and usually underestimated – influence over the aspirations and ambitions of their children, echoes Nathaniel Smith, managing director of Master Plumbers NSW. He reckons we need a “mothers for plumbers” movement.

We most certainly need all that – and more.

Great expectations

Ash Bryan went to Scots College, an elite private boys’ school in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, which in April opened a much talked-about $60 million faux baronial castle as its student centre. After finishing his HSC in 2018, Bryan, tall with neat, short hair parted on the side, went straight into a commerce degree at Macquarie University, mostly during the messy Zoom times of COVID-19. After graduating – and notching up a HECS debt of $40,000 – he ended up on a conveyor belt of interviews. “I applied for many positions in marketing and management … it was very competitive and extremely difficult, and a lot of my friends are still having the same problems.”

He hated the process. “You’d have to wait a couple of months for them to get back to you and if you were successful, you would just move on to a different stage of recruiting, like, another personality test or something like that. There are six stages of recruiting, which is a bit ridiculous, all for you to be rejected.”

Bryan says, “There’s no guarantee for success and promotions but with a trade, after you qualify, you can earn a decent amount of money pretty quickly.”Credit: Louie Douvis

His parents – mum, stepdad and dad – were on board with his next move, which was to go into the trades. A family friend hired him as an apprentice refrigeration mechanic. “It’s a pretty extreme change,” Bryan says, but so far, it’s working out.

At 24, he’s the oldest in his apprenticeship class, but his age means the pay is better, he explains. “It’s good,” he reflects of his job. “I’m just getting the hang of it all and trying to pick up all these different skills.” He says the industry is very safety-aware – the vibe is to ask for help if you need it. The prospect of climbing into narrow roof spaces might freak some out, but Bryan says he has no phobias. TAFE is more satisfying than university, he adds: “It’s in person, it’s really well-structured; a combination of blocks [of study periods at TAFE] and going in one day a week.” He adds that TAFE is more challenging than many might imagine. “Yes, it’s pass-fail – but to pass, you need to get 70 per cent.”

Does he regret not pursuing a career in marketing? “There’s no guarantee for success and promotions but with a trade, after you qualify, you can earn a decent amount of money pretty quickly. You can pave your own way from there. I don’t think many kids grow up wanting to do a trade, and it’s not really put forward by schools,” he says. And if he winds up running his own business, his degree will come in useful, too.

Alex Schearer also had no idea what he wanted to do with his life when he left Daramalan College, an independent co-ed Catholic school in the ACT, at the end of 2012. He went straight into hospitality, and worked his way up. Along the way, he started seeing schoolteacher Maddison Whan, who thought he’d be really good at a trade.

This had never occurred to him: he had never even studied woodwork at school. He tried a few different courses at university – teaching, marketing, architecture – but they didn’t suit him. After Schearer spent 12 years in hospitality – including a final gig that didn’t work out – Whan, by now his wife, reminded him of what she’d said years earlier. By this time, he was in his late 20s, and he finally listened.

‘Some schools don’t even really understand that it’s a viable career path.’

Alex Schearer

Now he’s a year out from completing cabinetmaking at TAFE, and he loves it. “Carpenters build houses, cabinetmakers fill houses,” he says with a gleam in his eye.

A variety of physical and mental skills are needed for most trades, such as agility, concentration, strength, attention to detail and, ideally, no fear of heights. Schearer has all that and the physical stuff down pat. Very sporty, he played basketball through school and still plays three nights a week. “I’m quite an energy-driven, outgoing sort of person,” he says.

But he has some advice for Whan’s dad, and it’s not about the built-ins his father-in-law made a few years ago in the apartment the couple now share with their baby, Lizzie.

Schearer’s father-in-law is Steve Whan, the NSW minister for skills, TAFE and tertiary education. Schearer says Whan has spent a lot of time talking to him about apprenticeship pathways – but even more importantly, talking to everyone across the sector. His advice for his father-in-law: “Try to focus on the financial side. That’s a big barrier for why people don’t get into it.” He says that at his age, the starting pay for an apprentice isn’t too bad. But a lot of apprentices start straight out of school and the money is lousy. Those who don’t finish school can earn less than $500 gross a week, school-leavers under 21 between $500 and $700 a week. Full-time first-year plumbers older than 21 earn about $950.

Steve Whan, the NSW minister for skills, and his son-in-law Alex Schearer, who is a cabinetmaking apprentice.Credit: Rohan Thomson

And getting to young people before they finish school is also crucial, Schearer adds. “Some schools don’t even really understand that it’s a viable path, that there’s longevity in those careers. Having discussions with high schools would be good.”

That means all high schools, private and public. Steve Whan says diplomatically: “I think there’s an inconsistency across schools. Some schools certainly focus on universities.”

There aren’t too many academic experts on apprenticeships who began their working lives on the tools. Stephen Billett, now professor of adult and vocational education at Griffith University, started a two-year course at Hollings College, Manchester, a British equivalent of TAFE, in 1969. He wanted to do anything other than go down a coal mine or work at Leyland, the hub of the British car industry. He was 17, learning tailored garment manufacturing and had to start at the bottom, working on production lines, cutting and machining. “Private schools are concerned about getting young people into university and, generally speaking, they are not interested in vocational education,” Billett says.

There is, he adds, a real disconnect between what governments and the community say and what they do. He remembers putting together a research project to understand perceptions of vocational education in the community: “I don’t want my children even thinking about going into vocational education,” one survey volunteer told him.

Billett says independent schools make a lot of noise about providing their students with a range of opportunities – but that range is really about displaying to students what’s on offer at a university. “That’s not terribly helpful,” he sighs.

Stephen Billett, an education professor, says private schools focus on universities.

If something is perceived to be low-status, there will always be difficulty with recruitment, he observes. “It’s not just a question of vocational education; it’s the occupation that vocational education serves.” Public schools face an even tougher challenge when they have to compete with private schools for students, with performance indicators geared around the number of students gaining entry to university.

Governments, Billett says, need to be clearer about how they promote these skills. Industry bodies, which speak on behalf of the businesses and sectors that employ apprentices, need to do a lot more to elevate the standing of the work and show that it’s interesting, diverse and, thanks to new technology, not necessarily dirty.

Why so few women?

The vast majority of tradies are men. Decades of campaigning, including that quaint phrase “lady tradies”, have barely managed to shift the dial, which hovers at about 3 per cent for women on the tools.

‘He’s like, “We need you to lift heavy things and stuff … I’m not keen on having a girl on my team at the moment.” ’

Beth Langford

Beth Langford, 21, of Parramatta, went to a Catholic high school. “I took a gap year after high school, worked, and then realised I actually wanted to learn a trade.” When she was growing up, Langford’s dad ran a wood machining and joinery business. Her brothers helped out around the workshop and she, too, offered assistance, even if it was just office work: she knew she had wood in her blood. “I’ve always wanted to work outdoors, and being in the bush or in the mud or anything like that doesn’t really bother me too much,” she says.

Carpentry apprentice Beth Langford says earning while learning “weighs on the good side”.Credit: Brent Lewin

But Langford found jobs to be few and far between, despite the skills shortage. “I had a rough start trying to find [an employer] because they weren’t interested in having a woman,” she says. “A school friend put me in touch with this one guy, but he just wasn’t interested in giving me a go because he didn’t think I’d be strong enough. He’s like, ‘I don’t think you’ll be able to keep up. We need you to lift heavy things and stuff. I’m not really keen on having a girl on my team at the moment.’ ”

This “interview” took place over the phone. The employer had never even set eyes on Langford. This is a woman who is happy being up ladders and on roofs; she’s 180 centimetres tall, muscular and goes to the gym three times a week. At school, she played water polo, basketball, netball, touch footy. She deadlifts 100 kilograms.

Langford is now halfway through the second year of a carpentry apprenticeship and loving it, despite the juggling act between TAFE studies, her job and having a life. “You have to study on top of your eight-hour days [that are] sometimes longer. It’s a bit of a struggle to balance everything, but my TAFE teacher has been very helpful with that.”

She works for Reacon Carpentry, a small team of carpenters working principally on residential work such as extensions, decks and pergolas. Her current project: laying a boardwalk among mangroves at Brooklyn, in Sydney’s outer northern suburbs. “[My boss] lets me have a crack with a lot of things and every now and then, he’ll send me out on my own to give a job a go.”

Currently, Langford is living at home with her family, but she won’t have that buffer soon. “I’m struggling with it at the moment because my family’s going to move out of Sydney. I don’t have to pay for my course, so I have to remember that. It weighs on the good side that I’m able to learn while also getting paid.”

What does the future hold? Langford wants to make and repurpose furniture and build her own house. She may end up running her own business; she’s not sure. What about in the short term? “My main goal is to work with more girls,” she laughs.

Rae Cooper is professor of gender, work and employment relations and the director of the University of Sydney’s Australian Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusion at Work. I ask her why there are so few women in trades. She says there are still supply-side barriers, including limited encouragement for girls at school, gendered norms about “appropriate” work, and stereotypical images of work in the trades being hard and dirty. But, she adds, “we can’t ignore the demand-side challenges like long, inflexible hours and hostile workplace cultures – especially in construction – that continue to block women and drive them away.” Cooper says both sides must be addressed: better school-based outreach, some creativity about entry pathways for women at different career stages, and real workplace change – tackling hostility, improving culture and redesigning jobs to support retention as well as recruitment.

Kilani Brophy doesn’t know any other women plumbers, but this doesn’t worry her. She’s currently working on a Downer Group site in Melbourne, which is all blokes, and says she gets on well with all of them. “They treat me the same as everybody else,” she laughs. “I’m two-and-a-half years in, and I’m loving it.” Brophy moved here from New Zealand and lives with her dad, which means she doesn’t have to worry about the pay too much. “It would have been a different story if I didn’t have family backing.”

Apprentice plumber Kilani Brophy says living with her dad helps with bills.Credit: Photograph by Chris Hopkins

She knew very early on that sitting behind a laptop or working from an office was never going to be her thing. How does she find plumbing? Quite good, she says. “As a kid I was an outdoors person, I wanted something more hands-on. I’ve always been an athletic-type girl, so I love my sports. I love going out running in the dirt and stuff like that.”

Brophy tells me something surprising. Plumbing is a hardcore trade, and you might imagine that there is no flexibility. But a few months ago, Brophy, 21, who has black, long hair and is strong and compact, injured her anterior cruciate ligament playing netball in Footscray. She feared Downer would get rid of her. Instead, she’s doing a few months of data entry while her knee heals. She’s confident the company, which needs more plumbers, will continue to back her. She has 18 months remaining as an apprentice.

In-house influencers

Another group of people who have a huge impact on the choices made by young people are careers advisers (for schools lucky enough to have them). When Jobs and Skills Australia’s Barney Glover gave an address to the National Press Club last year, he was among the first to point to an unspoken problem. “I’ll be blunt, we need to raise enthusiasm – in numbers too big to ignore – for vocational education and training from deep within our school system,” he said.

What he meant was: we need quality careers advice. Careers advisers are the scouts, the leaders, the in-house influencers in schools. They can be the circuit-breakers who communicate the value of vocational education. “We need to urgently address, with all the energy we can muster, the cultural challenge of ensuring we promote a parity of esteem between VET and higher education,” Glover added.

Wright, of the Electrical Trades Union, has done the numbers. To staff every builder with enough electricians to build houses and to work on transmission lines across the country, we need those 42,500 extra electricians in five years he’s already talked about. Plus, we need to keep the ones we have now.

If there’s one thing that has come out of vocational research, it’s that classroom teachers have far more impact upon the choice students make than career advisers. That’s because teachers spend more time with the students and thus have more influence – although not always in a positive way.

‘Everyone comes out of university looking for the exact same job and there’s not enough of them.’

Jett Brassington

“I remember my high school teacher said to me, ‘Billett, you’ll end up sweeping the streets of Ormskirk [a town near Liverpool in England],’ ” recalls Stephen Billett. “And there’s this sort of narrative that comes out where people say, ‘Well, if you aren’t any good at maths, you’ll end up, you know, working in the trades or something like that.’ ”

Kylie Hillman, senior research fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research, says the vast majority of schools have specific teachers responsible for career guidance, but it’s not their full-time role and there’s no indication how much of their workload it comprises. She adds that universities visit schools all the time. Representatives of vocational education, not so much.

Jett Brassington, 19, from Sydney’s inner west, has just started an electrical apprenticeship. He went to the private, co-educational St Andrew’s Cathedral School in Sydney, where he says there were lots of careers nights, but trades were only mentioned in passing. “University people came in and talked about business and finance degrees, but no one came in and talked about being an electrician. I’ve been told I’m set for life. Everyone comes out of university looking for the exact same job and there’s not enough of them. But I know I’ll always have work.”

Part of a small team with three qualified tradespeople and two other apprentices, Brassington says that the stereotypes about construction being “scary” are all wrong. “It’s a big misunderstanding. You can ask as many questions as you like, everyone’s pretty supportive,” he says. He has a message for schools – stop giving a broad overview and get specific. “They should speak about apprenticeships to everyone.”

Stopping the swapping

Beginning a trade is one thing; finishing it is another. TAFE’s figures say that only about half of those who start apprenticeships complete their course. That’s a huge attrition rate. John King, of the National Centre for Vocational Education Research, says most people drop out very early in apprenticeships. The top reasons: low pay, challenging working conditions, or both. That’s the case for about three in 10 apprentices, according to surveys. “We do see an inverse relationship with unemployment, particularly trade apprenticeships,” says King. “When the economy is strong, they [young apprentices] tend to follow the money – they’re looking for better-paid jobs, which might not require a qualification.”

Part of the problem has been the gradual degradation of TAFE. But in the past few years, efforts have been taken to reverse the decline: more teachers with better qualifications, better student support, and more funding. The federal Labor government introduced free TAFE to attract more students.

When the NSW Labor government was elected in 2023, it became clear to Steve Whan that TAFE was in trouble: “TAFE didn’t feel like the government supported it. Morale was down.” Former federal Department of Education secretary Michele Bruniges was commissioned to lead a review of TAFE NSW, fulfilling an election promise, in part because it was becoming increasingly hard to find skilled tradies to teach the next generation of apprentices.

The review came back with 21 recommendations. Key point? The state government should be a steward of TAFE. More specifically? Fix the VET workforce. That’s well underway. A program to increase salaries for prospective TAFE teachers while they are training has been a huge success – so far, about 1700 permanent full-time teachers have started since Whan took on the ministry. “Often, people need a bit more wrap-around support during their apprenticeships than what they’re getting at the moment,” says Whan. Full-time teachers are much more likely to have the capacity to provide support beyond the classroom.

‘No one drops out of their apprenticeship because they’re having too much fun.’

Michael Wright

Other crucial recommendations include strengthening the role of the high-school careers adviser to be a dedicated position, and embedding school-based apprenticeships and traineeships.

Andrew Norton, professor of higher education policy at Monash University, says it’s to be expected that young people switch courses, dropping out both in TAFE and at universities. But Wright of the ETU is blunt, describing rates as being at “an appallingly high level. No one drops out of their apprenticeship because they’re having too much fun. You drop out because wages are too low; because you’re getting bullied or harassed. To be honest, we get more [reports of] underpayments from apprentices proportionally than any other sector of our members, and yet they’re the lowest-paid. And they drop out because they’re not getting the mentoring and support.”

Andrew Norton, a professor of higher education, says young people often switch courses and drop out of TAFE as well as uni.Credit: Arsineh Houspian

Yes, there are problems in TAFE – but there are also problems with the supervision in on-the-job training. The son of an old family friend tells me this story. He went to a fancy private school. No one ever mentioned apprenticeships to him: “Parents don’t pay schools that kind of money for their kid to end up an electrician.” And he didn’t look like he would be on that track, either. He had brilliant academic results and studied to be a teacher. But after a couple of years in the classroom, he decided that wasn’t for him. Instead, surprising everyone, he decided to become an electrician.

He found an employer who was, in the young man’s own words, “a bit of an arsehole”. Armed with Red Bull, the boss would arrive to pick up his young charge at 7am each day. “He was very knowledgeable and great with customers. But he berated his staff all the time; he had a bad temper. I had no idea what to expect, what it was going to be like, but I stuck it out for two- and-a-half years,” he says.

He completed his apprenticeship in a much bigger company through what are called group training organisations, which recruit apprentices and trainees and match them with employers. Today, he absolutely loves his work and wouldn’t swap it for anything else.

The last word

Here are some figures that might make us rethink vocational education. Those who complete their qualifications do really well. A March 2025 NCVER report stated that more than 95 per cent of apprentices walked straight into a job in 2024. The undergraduate employment rate, meanwhile, was 79 per cent in 2023.

Government incentives can work – in November last year, for example, Western Australia started offering $10,000 to any tradie who would move from the east coast. But incentives only work as long as they are offered.

We also need to broaden recruitment. We need men and women from public, private and Catholic schools. That means more recognition from parents that a business degree isn’t necessarily a holy grail (not that there’s anything wrong with them). It also means a change of mindset from careers advisers and teachers.

As I’ve talked to people over the past few months, it has become apparent that we only recruit from a small sector of the population: we don’t really try to persuade women; most private schools don’t bother. State and territory governments should intervene. They could fund full-time specialist careers advisers in every school, as well as vocational education organisations, if we are to train ourselves out of this crisis – and it is a crisis.

An apprentice’s starting pay sucks – it’s impossible for anyone living independently. Early working conditions can be appalling. TAFE was ignored for years under successive Coalition governments, a training shemozzle. And even when apprentices secure employment, sometimes their bosses are not up to steering young people on the job – something that’s hard to do well even if you have trained to be a teacher.

Let’s give electrical apprentice Jett Brassington the final word. He lives at home with his mum and sister, so the pay is manageable, “but if you had to support yourself, you’d literally just be living pay cheque to pay cheque.” He’s looking forward to finishing in three years. “Once I finish my apprenticeship, the money’s pretty good. Like, you’re fresh, 22, everyone’s just finishing their degrees, and you’re already on a full-time salary.”

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