Forget engineering/computer science/plastics...blue collar is the future

it would be a welcome relief around here, contractors are like hens teeth

 

Yes. there's always a NEED for good blue collar commercial service workers. You can't ship those jobs overseas. Smart, dependable workers can always find a job, even if it's only seasonal. Electricians, carpenters, plumbers, welders, mechanics. I didn't get my degree until I landed a steady job in a large facility. The degree was a requirement, if I wanted to move up the ranks. I was reimbursed for 90% of it.

These people do need a good honest financial planner, since most of these jobs rarely has pensions. Otherwise they end up working until they die.

YMMV

 

I spent most of my career doing programming of one form or another. Whenever I talked to the younger generation, I said computers were going to be a part of their future, so they definitely should learn about them. However, whatever you do, don't go into computer programming for a career. It's a never-ending treadmill of new languages, new computer systems, and a lifetime of playing catch-up. In college, I learned FORTRAN on punched cards. That didn't last past my first couple of years in the "real world", and even then, the punched cards were a thing of the past. I started off working with people who had Ph. D.s and, at the end of my career, would lose out to people who just got out of high school, because they had been trained in the latest languages, while I was still working on last year's technology.

To say that AI is taking over programming makes it worse, but not by all that much. I still think that people need to be trained in critical thinking, engineering, problem-solving, and many other skills. Somebody's gotta feed the machine the relevant information. Automation has also made a lot of blue-collar jobs irrelevant over the years as well. I don't envy future generations.

 

I believe you were a couple of semesters ahead of me - the punch card reader got retired/regulated to reading Scantrons. We were the first semester to be able to directly key into our mini-mainframe. Cobol, Pascal, Frotran77, RPGII, BASIC, CPM, DOS and a plethora of other dead sea useless languages I've learned over the decades.
Last year, my youngest brother in-law asked me if I was interested in some contract work. Their guy died and left an operable Cobol accounting system. Told him to migrate the system to something more up to date and portable. It's going to be a big chunk of money up front, but you'll be able to incorporate/update new devices and update data much quicker. He was surprised when I asked him how old was his latest data points. 3-days, a week, two weeks, a month old???? That's the lead-time your giving to a major fraud; if you catch it.

 

plenty of openings in farming lately

 

John Deere mechanic with access rights to their proprietary diagnostic software. You've got them by their nads....