Ford CEO Jim Farley said 'the air we breathe is a four-year degree,' and Christina Sass agreed the country pushes college as the default path. She argues that is leaving skilled trades short of workers, even as demand stays high.
A new report from the Alliance for America’s Skilled Trades says employers will have to fill about 1.7 million skilled trades openings every year through 2035. Training programs are preparing roughly 55 people for every 100 of those jobs.
But the deeper problem is not just recruitment. Sass says 71% of teens would be proud to pursue a skilled trade, and 81% of parents would be proud if their child did. Yet out of every 100 people who start an apprenticeship, only 48 finish, and just 29 are working in a trade five years later.
That means the bottleneck is not only before enrollment. It is what happens after a young worker says yes. Sass says getting to class can mean a car payment or a two-hour bus ride, while childcare does not pause for an apprenticeship. She says Ford's new investment in getting trades students to class goes directly at one of those barriers.
She also says employers have built other barriers. Apprentices earn little while they learn, and in some trades they carry costs that employers used to cover. In auto repair, she says, many technicians are paid a set rate per repair regardless of how long the job takes, and they buy their own tools. A new technician who is still learning works slower and absorbs the loss.
Sass says her organization has spent more than a decade building automotive talent pipelines in Mexico and South Africa. In Mexico, she says, it worked with automakers, suppliers, and coatings companies to design technical tracks in automotive painting, tool and die manufacturing, and automation, then embedded them across 28 campuses of the State of Mexico's technical college system. An evaluation of graduates from two of those tracks found 82% were employed within five to six months.
She says the model works when employers help decide what gets taught, students get mentoring and career guidance, and there is a real job waiting. She also says outdated training is another reason people drop out or fail to last on the job.
The Alliance's report is a warning to employers as much as a call to schools. If completion and retention stay hidden, capital and labor both keep flying blind. The market does not reward nice slogans; it rewards workers who finish and productivity that lasts. The companies that want more trades labor have to pay for the pipeline, not just advertise it.
