I Asked Him Who Trained Him

Had an electrician out in May to put a subpanel in the garage. Kid was maybe twenty-six. Polite, quick, knew his way around a conduit bender.

While he worked I asked him who trained him.

He said, “YouTube, mostly.”

Not a joke. He’d done a short program at a technical college, got hired, and figured out the rest on his own. Said there was one older guy at his company who knew everything, but the man was too busy to teach and retiring in the fall.

I told my buddy Vince about it that weekend. Vince ran electrical crews for forty-one years. Retired two years back. He listened to the whole story, then said something that stuck with me.

“Nobody ever asked me.”

Forty-one years of knowing exactly what he was doing, and when he walked out the door, nobody had made any arrangement for where that went.

This isn’t one kid with a phone. It’s the whole trade, and the arithmetic is ugly.

A JLL report out this April projects roughly 2.1 million skilled trades jobs going unfilled by 2030 — electricians, HVAC techs, plumbers, pipefitters, equipment operators, maintenance workers. More than one in five construction workers is already past 55. Among union electricians, close to a third are between 50 and 70, with something like 20,000 retiring every year for the next decade.

Research from McKinsey puts the sharpest point on it. Roughly 70% of electrical supervisors are baby boomers. Not the crews — the supervisors. The people who know why a job goes wrong before it goes wrong.

And the replacement math doesn’t work. One February analysis found roughly five tradespeople retiring for every two coming in. Meanwhile 92% of construction firms report trouble finding qualified people, and electrician jobs are projected to grow 9.5% through 2034 — triple the average across all occupations.

Everybody frames this as a jobs story for young people. It’s really a knowledge story, and the knowledge is sitting in your garage watching golf.

A kid can learn code from a book. He can learn technique from a video. What he can’t get anywhere is the judgment.

Knowing a job is going sideways from the sound of it. Knowing which general contractor pays on time and which one will bury you in change orders. Knowing when to tell a customer no. Knowing the shortcut that works and the one that gets somebody hurt.

Vince put it better than I could. He said a young guy can wire a panel correctly and still have no idea what he’s looking at.

That gap took you thirty or forty years to close. It doesn’t transfer through a manual. It transfers through somebody standing next to you asking questions.

Nobody is going to knock on your door. Vince waited two years for someone to ask and nobody did. You have to make one phone call. Here’s where I’d point it.

▸ Registered apprenticeship programs. Every registered apprentice is assigned a mentor — that’s built into the structure. The federal site lists sponsors and programs by trade and state. Call a sponsor near you and say you’re a retired journeyman willing to help.
▸ Your old union’s training center. If you came up through a union, the local training committee is the single fastest door. They already know your name and they are short on instructors.
▸ The community college that trained that kid. Trade programs run on adjunct instructors and they are chronically hard to staff, because anyone qualified to teach can make more doing the work. A retired guy who doesn’t need the income is exactly who they can’t find. Ask what credentials they need — it varies by state and by program, and it’s often less than you’d assume.
▸ The high school shop program. Career and technical education is coming back in a lot of districts, and those teachers are usually one person running everything alone. An extra set of experienced hands one morning a week is a real gift.
▸ Your own old company. The simplest version. Call whoever runs it now and offer two mornings a month to ride along with the newest hire. No title, no payroll, no meetings. Vince did this one first because it took one phone call.

This is not a plan to make money. I want to be clear about that, because there’s a whole industry telling guys our age to package up their expertise and charge for it.

Adjunct teaching pays something, and it’s modest. Union training work sometimes pays and sometimes doesn’t. Riding along with a young hire at your old shop pays nothing at all.

If you need income, this is the wrong column. Go get a real part-time job.

But if you’ve got enough and you’re bored and the thing you were best at is currently doing nobody any good — that’s a different problem, and this is the fix for it.

Start with one person, not a program. A single young worker you show up for twice a month is worth more than a curriculum you never finish designing.

Set the terms yourself. Two mornings a month, or one afternoon a week, whatever you’ll actually do in February when you don’t feel like it. Say the number out loud when you offer. Otherwise it drifts into every Tuesday and you quit by spring.

Don’t teach. Let him work and ask him questions. “Why’d you run it that way?” does more than an hour of you talking. He’ll find his own mistake and that one sticks.

And expect to be no good at it for a while. Knowing how to do something and knowing how to explain it are two different skills. You spent forty years on the first one and about a week on the second.

Vince called his old company in June. Told them he’d ride along with their newest apprentice two mornings a month. They said yes before he finished the sentence.

First morning he came back annoyed. Said the kid did everything the hard way and wouldn’t listen. Second morning was worse.

By the fifth, something turned. The kid started calling him between visits with questions. Vince started keeping notes on his phone about things he wanted to show him.

I saw him last week. He was in the middle of explaining a service upgrade the kid had botched and how they’d fixed it together, and he was talking with his hands the way he used to when he still ran crews.

Then he stopped and said the thing I keep thinking about. “Two years I sat around waiting for somebody to ask. Turns out I was the one who had to ask.”

Somewhere out there is a twenty-six-year-old learning your trade off a phone.

Make the call. Nobody’s going to make it for you.

— Walter