Ford CEO Jim Farley recently said “the air we breathe is a four-year degree.” In other words, college is the default path we steer every kid toward. He’s right, and he deserves credit for pushing back on it. Ford has even commissioned Ad Council research on how students, parents, and teachers see the trades.
The Alliance for America’s Skilled Trades, which Ford launched with Google, BlackRock, and Carhartt, just released a detailed new look at what the country needs. The headline most outlets ran with is that 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 number that stopped me was further down in the report. Much of the public conversation has focused on persuasion, and this number suggests that isn’t where the biggest gap is. Seventy-one percent of teens say they would be proud to pursue a skilled trade, and 81% of parents would be proud if their child did. Yet of every 100 people who start an apprenticeship, only 48 finish. Just 29 are working in a trade five years later.
We are losing people after they’ve already said yes. America can’t afford to waste young talent on the way to work. The bigger lever is what happens after enrollment, and much of that is in employers’ hands.
Why people walk away
Finishing isn’t cheap. Getting to class can mean a car payment or a two-hour bus ride, and childcare doesn’t pause for an apprenticeship. Ford’s new investment in getting trades students to class goes straight at one of these barriers, and that matters.
Other barriers are ones employers built. Apprentices earn little while they learn, and in some trades they carry costs that employers used to cover. Many auto technicians, for example, are paid a set rate per repair regardless of how long the job takes, and they buy their own tools. A new tech who is still learning works slower and absorbs the loss.
No awareness campaign fixes that. Employers control the destination, and a pathway only holds people if the destination pays enough to make finishing worth it.
What finishing looks like
At the International Youth Foundation, we’ve spent more than a decade building automotive talent pipelines in Mexico and South Africa. One lesson keeps holding up. People finish when the training is built with the employers who will hire them.
In Mexico, we worked with automakers, suppliers, and coatings companies to design technical tracks in automotive painting, tool and die manufacturing, and automation. Then we embedded them across 28 campuses of the State of Mexico’s technical college system, so they would outlast any single grant. An evaluation of graduates from two of those tracks found 82% were employed within five to six months.
What made it work isn’t unique to Mexico. Employers help decide what gets taught. Students get mentoring and career guidance alongside technical training. And there’s a real job waiting.
Teach the job as it is now
Outdated training is another way we lose people. A graduate who learned last decade’s version of the job shows up unprepared, and either doesn’t get hired or doesn’t last. Matt Sigelman, whose Burning Glass Institute co-produced the report, said the jobs most resistant to automation are the ones built on varied, complex tasks that require human judgment. That means the training has to keep up with the work.
When electric vehicle manufacturing arrived in Mexico, we worked with the National Auto Parts Industry Association to define what the new jobs actually require, then built training around them. Industry defined the standard. Schools taught it.
What the Alliance can do next
Ford and its partners have done the hard first step by measuring the problem, including how many people never finish. The next step is accountability. Every Alliance member should publish completion and five-year retention rates for the training programs it funds or runs, so we can see which ones actually get people to work. Employers should be inside public technical schools co-writing curriculum instead of building parallel programs on the side. They should pay people while they learn and cover the tools the job requires. With DEWALT and Milwaukee Tool among the Alliance’s newest members, the companies that make those tools are now at the table, and that’s real progress. And the jobs at the end should pay a living wage.
The country doesn’t need to convince young people that the trades are worth it. They already believe it. Our job is to make sure the ones who say yes make it all the way to work.
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