Economic mobility is alive and well for Americans who pursue
technical or practical training, by TAMAR JACOBY July 18, 2014 3:13 p.m. ET ANTHONY SOLIS, WELDER | Some welders can earn more than
$100,000 a year. Eric Kayne for The Wall Street Journal
Dakota Blazier had made a big decision. Friendly and
fresh-faced, from a small town north of Indianapolis, he'd made up his mind: He
wasn't going to college.
"I discovered a long time ago," he explained,
"I'm not book smart. I don't like sitting still, and I learn better when
the problem is practical." But he didn't feel this limited his options—to
the contrary. And he was executing a plan as purposeful as that of any of his
high-school peers.
It started in his junior year with release time from high
school to take a course in basic construction skills at a craft training center
run by the Associated Builders and Contractors. The next step was an internship
with a local contractor, Gaylor Electric.
This summer, he's at Gaylor full time, earning $10 an hour
plus credits he can apply at the ABC training center, where he intends to
return this fall for a four-year apprenticeship. Mr. Blazier, 18, beamed as he
explained his plan. This was no fallback, no desperate Hail Mary pass. It was a
thoughtful choice—and he was as proud and excited as if he were heading off to
the Ivy League.
College-educated Americans tend to know mostly other
college-educated Americans and to think that is the norm, if not universal. In
fact, just three in 10 Americans age 25 or older have bachelor's degrees.
Another 8% are high-school dropouts, leaving the overwhelming majority—more
than 60%—in circumstances something like Mr. Blazier's.
The questions that keep him up at night aren't about
inequality: How rich am I, or, how rich is my
neighbor ? What he worries about is the kinds of opportunities open
to him. Can he get an education that equips him for a job he wants? Can he find
that job and build on it to make a career? His concern is economic mobility.
The changing economy isn't encouraging. New technologies and
globalization are driving deep-seated change—and no one knows for sure what it
will mean for most Americans. But one thing is certain: The future will put a
premium on technical skill. Educators and employers agree: High school is no
longer enough.
Americans have a host of postsecondary options other than a
four-year degree—associate degrees, occupational certificates, industry
certifications, apprenticeships. Many economists are bullish about the
prospects of what they call "middle-skilled" workers. In coming
years, according to some, at least a third and perhaps closer to half of all
U.S. jobs will require more than high school but less than four years of
college—and most will involve some sort of technical or practical training.
STEPHANIE RABELLO, REGISTERED NURSE | Working her way from
practical nurse to registered nurse to bachelor-degree nurse. Preston Mack
for The Wall Street Journal
Will these be just jobs—or real careers? Is the system
preparing enough Americans to fill them? Are there adequate opportunities for
training? Do we do enough to steer young people toward technical training?
As Mr. Blazier knows, there are plenty of opportunities for
people like him to get ahead. Despite our digital-age prejudices against
practical skills, Americans are quietly reinventing upward mobility. Consider
three often overlooked paths: welder, nurse and franchise manager.
The first requirement of any upward path is entry ramps at
the ground level. The Craft Training Center of the Coastal Bend, in Corpus
Christi, Texas, teaches welding to 200 high-school students, mostly at-risk
youth. When Anthony Solis first heard about the program, he was close to
dropping out. He didn't know what welding was but decided to give it a try—at
least it would get him out of class a few days a week.
Unlike his father, who didn't need even a high-school
diploma to make a decent living on an oil rig, Mr. Solis, now 19, knew he needed
some kind of qualification. He found that he liked the hands-on aspect of the
training program. Suddenly, math came more easily—he needed it to calculate
weight and volumes.
Welding itself was harder, but he learned that he could do
well if he tried—something he'd rarely experienced in a classroom. Soon, he was
attending not just his for-credit class but also an adult program in the
evening, and he returned to the center that summer for a career-prep course—all
of it subsidized by his high school and a local employer group.
The second requirement of any good upward path is for
training to lead to a job. Mr. Solis's big break came last August, when he and
20 other Coastal Bend students auditioned for JV Industrial, which does
high-risk, high-paying maintenance work in oil refineries. JV had never
recruited at the Corpus Christi center, and Mr. Solis was so nervous that he
was almost ill on the day of the hands-on test. Still, he made the grade and
headed off to Houston for more free training—with the possibility of a big job
if he finished.
A third requirement of a good career path is that it must be
aligned with economic needs. This is where employers like JV can make all the
difference. Many high schools and community colleges teach job skills, but too
many of them use outmoded techniques and equipment or steer young people to
industries that aren't growing. The best way to stay current is to partner with
an employer, who can offer advice about what's in demand, help design
curricula, lend equipment, even—like JV—provide training.
It isn't always easy to find an industry partner: Training
is expensive, and some firms fear that competitors will poach the workers whom
they train. But a growing number of farsighted companies—often bigger firms in
growing fields such as construction, manufacturing or IT—grasp the mutual
benefit. What better way, after all, to attract and retain good employees?
This is especially true in a trade like welding, where
demand can sometimes seem insatiable. The average age in the field is 54, and
the American Welding Institute predicts openings for more than 400,000 workers
by 2024—welders and others who need welding skills, such as pipe fitters,
plumbers and boilermakers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs the average wage
at $36,300 a year, but anecdotal evidence suggests that is the low end of
what's possible. JV Industrial says that it pays more like $75,000, with some
employees earning more than $100,000. In the burgeoning shale industry, in
Texas and Appalachia, welders can earn as much as $7,000 a week.
Like construction, nursing is a time-tested path to the
middle class, and it has many of the same hallmarks: easy on-ramps,
goal-oriented job training and a series of ascending steps, with
industry-certified credentials to guide the way.
The profession is already growing robustly. From 2000 to
2010, the number of registered nurses increased by 24%. But the aging of the
baby-boom generation will sharpen demand even as it reduces supply: Roughly a
third of today's nurses are more than 50 years old.
Consider one microcosm: Orlando, Fla., where there are many
different ways into the nursing profession. The University of Central Florida
trains only bachelor-degree nurses. You need an outstanding high-school record,
there's a long waiting list, and tuition is $14,000 for in-state students—and
more than three times that if you're not from Florida. Two well-equipped,
award-winning community colleges—Seminole State and Valencia State—offer
associate-degree RN programs, where tuition is $7,500. Then there is Orlando
Tech, a county-run career center, located in an old building in an industrial
area near downtown, which trains licensed practical nurses for about $5,000.
It sounds insidious—a quintessentially inequitable, tracked
system, with RNs earning some $65,000 year and many licensed practical nurses,
or LPNs, starting below $40,000. But appearances can be deceptive. Alongside
the three tiers, there are myriad ways that different kinds of students can tap
into the programs and transfer among them, building their own upward paths,
sometimes over the course of a lifetime.
The streamlined route starts in high school: a "dual
enrollment" magnet program that allows focused, able students to earn
college credit and professional certifications, including as a nursing
assistant. Participants who enroll within two years at Seminole or Valencia get
advanced placement credit, saving as much as $1,250. And those who are really
in a hurry can matriculate simultaneously at UCF, earning "concurrent"
credit for advanced courses taken at community-college prices, then graduate in
just three years with a UCF bachelor's degree.
More often, though, the path up through the system is
slow—an intermittent process with many phases.
When Stephanie Rabello, 41, graduated from high school in
the early 1990s, all she could think about was getting into the nursing
profession—the sooner, the better—and she enrolled in a 10-month LPN program at
a local career center.
Her LPN license opened several doors: She worked in an elementary
school, a nursing home, a rehab hospital, often two jobs at once. But after
nearly 20 years as a practical nurse, she decided that she wanted more respect
and better compensation. So in 2012, she went back to school at Seminole State,
enrolling in a yearlong LPN-to-RN "bridge" program with online
classes and convenient clinical rotations that allowed her to continue working
while she upgraded.
Sherry Harris, 33, who followed a similar path from LPN to
RN, calls it "step-by-step" professional training—the
"working-class way in." Ms. Harris is now taking the next step: an
RN-to-BSN program for a bachelor of science degree in nursing.
Ms. Rabello also wants a bachelor's degree and is hoping to
enroll next spring at UCF. But for now, she's happy where she is. "I used
to be a floor nurse," she said. "When I graduated as an RN, the
facility promoted me to unit manager. That's exactly where I want to be—getting
some respect and moving up the ladder."
At first blush, franchising seems very different from welding
and nursing—no technical skills, no required training, no earned industry
certifications. But in many ways, it is a looser, market-driven version of the
same upward path: Young people start at the bottom of a practical trade and
learn by doing.
SHANA GONZALES, FRANCHISE RESTAURANT OWNER | She started as
a cashier at Taco Bell and now owns four restaurants in Atlanta. Raymond
McCrea Jones for The Wall Street Journal
Looking back, Shana Gonzales, 41, says that she always
wanted to be an entrepreneur. She came from a family of modest means: Her
father was a coal-miner in Arizona. Her first franchise job, in the early
1990s, was at a Taco Bell, where she worked as a part-time cashier while
attending community college.
More than 20 years later, she owns and operates four
fast-food restaurants in Atlanta that generate $3.5 million in annual revenue.
It wasn't an easy path, but it isn't uncommon in the
franchise industry. At McDonald's,MCD +0.63% some 60% of what
the company calls "owner/operators" started as hourly employees, as
did 63% of the chain's two dozen U.S. regional managers.
Ms. Gonzales's first break came after nine months on the
job. She was focused on her college classes and working just to earn some extra
cash. But the store manager noticed her: She was responsible, took initiative
and seemed curious about how the restaurant operated. Ms. Gonzales agreed to
undergo training, then spent 12 weeks studying a textbook and shadowing an
assistant manager. This qualified her as a shift manager.
She didn't expect the next promotion either, or the one
after that, although by then she'd been working in fast-food outlets for nearly
four years. Except for those first 12 weeks, everything she knew about the
restaurant business was self-taught. But the third promotion was a big job:
general manager, running her own store, with a regular salary and 15 direct
reports.
It was then that Ms. Gonzales started to see that the
franchise business might be more than just a job—there might be a career in it.
By this time, she was working for the Rally's Hamburgers brand, which was
purchased that year by a bigger company with a more corporate culture. Ms.
Gonzales and other midlevel managers were brought to Tampa periodically for
presentations and networking. She still remembers how eye-opening it was.
"The others had all started behind the counter too," she recalls.
"But this was the first time I had ever met other people like me—people
with the same desire to work hard and give everything they had to the company."
By 2003, when she left what was then Checkers Rally's, she was manager of
operations for Arizona and California, earning more than $100,000 a year in
salary and bonuses.
Ms. Gonzales's next boss, Aziz Hashim, has his own
rags-to-riches story. He started out in what he calls a "lower
middle-class" immigrant family in Los Angeles and earned a prestigious
degree as an electrical engineer—then quit abruptly to go into the franchise
business. Today, his company, NRD Holdings, owns more than 50 franchise
outlets, and he is seen as a rising star in the industry.
Still, he explains, neither he nor Ms. Gonzales is an
anomaly. "If you work hard in this business," he says, "you
can't help but rise. We owners have no choice but to hire from within and train
our own managers. No one comes out of school knowing how to run a fast-food
restaurant."
The hardest step up the franchising ladder is from
management to ownership. Franchising is the safest way to start a small
business. Though lesser-known brands can pose risks, most outlets open with a
popular product and a proven way of doing business. But it isn't cheap to get
started: The initial purchase fee is rarely less than $100,000 and usually
several times that.
Mr. Hashim's parents lent him their life savings. His
company has a program called "Own It!" to help his top managers make
the transition. Ms. Gonzales used his help to buy four Checkers outlets and
just this summer finished paying off her loan. Her goal is to buy 10 more
stores in the next five years.
Today's conventional wisdom about economic mobility in the
U.S. is gloomy and growing gloomier. We're told that good jobs are
disappearing, that less educated workers have bad work habits, that the U.S. is
falling behind other countries.
What's strange is that this isn't what you hear from many
people who are working toward the middle class: people training, saving and in
other ways striving to make it, who invariably see more dynamism and
possibility. Ms. Gonzales described her path as "opportunity after
opportunity. Every time I think about getting out of the business," she
says, "something exciting happens—a promotion or a new direction that
keeps me engaged."
Who's right? Surely, the answer is up to us—and not just the
strivers alone. One place to start would be by showing some respect for
practical training. As millions of Americans know, even in a knowledge economy,
countless valuable career skills can be learned outside a college classroom.
Ms. Jacoby is the president of Opportunity America, a
Washington-based nonprofit group working to promote economic mobility. She is
the author of "Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for
Integration" and the editor of "Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New
Immigrants and What It Means to Be American."
Source:http://online.wsj.com/articles/this-way-up-mobility-in-america-1405710779?tesla=y&mg=reno64-wsj
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