What advice do you have for a transition from white to blue collar work?

November 4, 2024 9:07 PM

I am a 27-year-old electrical engineer, and I am very frustrated with my career. I am strongly considering switching things up to become an electrician. My dream is to have a job where I feel like I am working for people in my community, not for the C-Suite of a multinational corporation. This is the main reason I am considering the trades. What advice would you give to someone moving from a white collar career to a blue collar one? How might I be able to use skills from my current career to get a head start in my new one? How would you suggest I go about finding an apprenticeship?

More about my background and reasons for making this change:

I come from a blue collar family background (mostly maritime trades), but I love computers and let that passion guide my career so far. I earned a B.S. in electrical engineering, worked at a Fortune 500 company for a few years, then set my sights on academia and have spent the past 2.5 years in a PhD program at a very elitist and very insufferable university. I am planning to walk out this December with a Master's degree.

I am a personable, charismatic, deeply community-oriented kind of guy. I feel socially/temperamentally ill-suited to the types of work available to me as an electrical engineer, despite my technical skills. I feel constrained by institutions -- constrained in how I can express myself, in my options for where to live, and how my work effects the people around me. Sure, the available jobs pay quite well if I go into industry -- but they will likely require moving to specific cities, working in big, impersonal corporate environments, suffering along with the stock market, and doing work that I ultimately feel hurts working people.

Here are some other (possibly misguided) reasons I am considering this move:

(1) Geographic flexibility;
(2) Income resilient to stock market fluctuations;
(3) With time, I will have the potential to become my own boss;
(4) I love interacting with customers;
(5) Removing myself from the 'rat race' and having time to focus on my artistic hobbies;
(6) Unionized workplaces!

I would love to hear your experiences!

posted by gunwalefunnel to Work & Money (23 answers total)

Would you have any interest in working on power transmission lines? Engineers who work out in the field can make quite a bit of money, which generally isn't tied to stock market fluctuations. Workplaces are unionized and not really in the "rat race". Given the need for electrification to facilitate the transition away from fossil fuels, this kind of work is generally good for people and the planet.

In general, you're likely to do better finding work with more of a blue collar flavour as an engineer than you would retraining for a trade, which would take a number of years. There are lots of jobs you can do as an electrical engineer that aren't working in an office.
posted by ssg at 9:28 PM on November 4 [7 favorites]

Have you considered becoming a Project Engineer? It's essentially the other end of what you've been training for. Check out the Project Management Institute. Also, PMs work internally or externally, depending on what and where you decide to pursue employment.

If it interests you, I suggest finding someone in the field and going for an informational interview.
posted by dancinglamb at 10:31 PM on November 4

I once worked in the non-profit space; now I'm a paramedic and firefighter. Despite the challenges of the job, I'm so happy I switched to a career in which I have a more direct connection to the community and other people. I've been doing it nearly twenty years, and I know I made the right decision.

But. The defining characteristic of a blue-collar job is that it destroys the one thing you need to keep working - your body. If you make this change, from Day 1 you should consider how to preserve your health, and specifically take care of your back. People form bad habits when they start a physical job in their twenties, when their body generally adjusts to whatever they put it through. They don't think about it until they tear a rotator cuff or seriously damage their back in a way that impacts their ability to work (and their quality of life going forward). I'd suggest paying attention to your overall fitness and lifting techniques now so you preserve your health.
posted by itstheclamsname at 11:45 PM on November 4 [22 favorites]

Keep in mind that blue collar is typically a lot harder on your body and your health... and keep your options open in case you need to change direction again.
posted by stormyteal at 12:56 AM on November 5 [8 favorites]

Hey, I’m an HVAC human (oddly enough with an unrelated college background and then years as a merchant mariner).

With an engineering background, I might suggest looking into building controls/automation. Johnson Controls does a lot with this, and they have a lot of unionized shops, and there will be a significant overlap with tradespeople in this kind of work. The pay is outstanding (6 figures easily), the work is mostly going to be brain work (rather than brawn work), and it’s something that’s going to be a lot more important as more places look to go green for efficiency reasons (less certain is what the potential effect of work from home will have on commercial real estate, which is the type of place that will use this setup).
posted by HVACDC_Bag at 2:46 AM on November 5 [10 favorites]

One of my teachers for my electrician apprenticeship classes followed the path you are interested in going down. Just an FYI, in my state and some others, a person with an EE degree can take the test for a Masters Electrician license right away.

To find an apprenticeship, visit the local union hall and ask about the process. There are also apprenticeships through non-union shops.

If you are looking to help communities over companies, consider working as an electrician for a municipality, then you will be a bit insulated from economic downturns.

Good luck!
posted by drezdn at 3:32 AM on November 5 [3 favorites]

I am in my 60s. I have been white collar, entrepreneurial, self employed my entire career. The only real regret in my life /career is not following my heart and becoming a carpenter or working with my hands and wood. While I did have a workshop for a while and built some very elaborate built-ins for my house, it never quite scratched the itch.

Go for it.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 4:13 AM on November 5 [4 favorites]

Besides contacting the union, you could ask apprenticeship instructors how their students got in the program. Your EE degree might let you skip some class time.

There are three main types of electrician apprenticeships where I am. Residential is the shortest, industrial, and then commercial.
posted by drezdn at 4:14 AM on November 5 [1 favorite]

I am a carpenter of 6 years who works with plenty of electricians, my wife is in school for electrical engineering now. My impression is that it takes about 10 years in most trades to get from "I am a base tradesperson who owns a screwdriver" to "I have a comfortable client network that refers an appropriate amount of community work to me." I dont know a ton about the union track, I think it depends a lot on your area.

I love my work and my community and even the career choices I've made, but white collar workers have a lot of inaccurate and romantic ideas about what it means to work with your hands, visible in this thread.

It sounds like you've never had a normal EE job? Fortune 500 and academia are not the only options. Have you looked into regional power companies, govt jobs, electronics manufacturing design, or fossil-->electric grid shift work?
posted by Summers at 6:18 AM on November 5 [8 favorites]

What specific slice of EE have you been focusing on thus far?
posted by aramaic at 7:41 AM on November 5

Response by poster: Several commenters have asked about the types of EE work I have done already, and/or suggested finding work in power generation.

> What specific slice of EE have you been focusing on thus far?

> Would you have any interest in working on power transmission lines?

All of my engineering experience is in integrated circuit design. I previously worked at a big tech company and currently do research funded by them. I unfortunately do not have a P.E. license, nor did I ever really do the coursework/training that would enable me to find work in the power generation sector. My EE skills are almost entirely focused on computer electronics, not power systems.

I appreciate these suggestions and am going to look into what kinds of skills I would need to pick up to work in power generation. But, from my current perspective, it seems that the amount of extra training required to switch to being an electrician and to being a power generation engineer are roughly the same. I do not think I would be able to find a job in power generation without additional training.

> I love my work and my community and even the career choices I've made, but white collar workers have a lot of inaccurate and romantic ideas about what it means to work with your hands, visible in this thread.

Understandable. I know from my family members in the trades that it is not easy work, and it's not particularly romantic. Mostly, I crave a more "human-scale" career, and the opportunity to live and work away from the city.
posted by gunwalefunnel at 9:53 AM on November 5

Besides the physical hardship inherent in blue-collar work, there is a subtle change of status that can be quite unsettling; you will be dropping down a caste or two and people who you would normally consider peers will be treating you like servants. This is especially noticeable if you're dealing with the client (ie, a household electrician), less so if you're part of a crew somewhat removed from the person paying for whatever it is (working in a factory or out on the line).

Working the trades is good, noble, satisfying work (mostly)! I prefer it. I don't know if I recommend leaving white collar work for the experience, but good luck to you regardless.
posted by Admiral Viceroy at 10:13 AM on November 5 [2 favorites]

Remote sensing, maybe? Lots of futzing with small electronics, and there's a (very small) niche in environmental work, Bureau of Land Management-adjacent stuff, and occasionally USGS/NOAA (assuming NOAA will continue to exist).

Job could range from designing a monitoring system, to trekking out into some hideous bog in the pouring rain to fix a sensor.

Your role would be mainly as a tech; the scientists would be the ones figuring out what to monitor and where.
posted by aramaic at 10:45 AM on November 5

My young adult children are both in the trades, and I'm an educated, white collar worker, so I can offer some insight into the differences and perhaps a few specific things about becoming an electrician.

First, while I don't know how it works everywhere, I can say that the IBEW has apprenticeship programs in many places. So it's not that you're necessarily in a unionized workplace, but you're in a union that is training you. It will likely be very transparent about the application process, training requirements, timeline, and pay throughout. There may be other ways to become an apprentice and get training, but that's likely the easiest path. In my area, they are recruiting heavily, and I think you'd find that there are many folks in IBEW apprenticeships who are coming in from other careers, including professional/white collar fields. It's not that unusual a situation, and, I might be misreading this, but you might need to put aside some of the elitism you might have learned in higher ed (I say this as someone who has been working on that myself, and apologies if that's not the case here).

I don't how much geographic flexibility you'd have as a business owner, which would depend on a local roster of clients, but it does seem like you'd be able to move around if you were willing to work for others.

My kids work a LOT, and it's not clear that they always have a choice in this. They sometimes do 8 hour days, but sometimes 9 or 10, and there often seem to be expectations of working on Saturdays. They get paid extra for this, but we live in a central area of our city, and they both drive 30-45 minutes each way for work as apprentices, and they have little control over this, so their days are quite long. Plus, the worksites change regularly, so it's not like you can live near work. One of my kids is working out, and he has time basically to go to work, workout, eat, and go to bed. He also hoped to have more time for hobbies, and I don't think that's working out right now.

My impression about their work and interactions with people is that they interact a fair amount with coworkers but also have solo work. If you want to interact with customers, that sounds like a higher level job, though perhaps you are imagining yourself as a business owner working for yourself?

These jobs are very physical. It's really hard to watch how hard my kids are being worked as young men.

Also, while we always need trades, this work can slow down in recessions, too.

Here's the Occupational Outlook Handbook info on electrical engineers and electricians. Both are growth professions right now. Those links will give you some info on data for individual states, too.

I wonder if you can bring some creativity into thinking about how you might use your engineering degree a bit differently? Do you have to join the rat race? What if decided to work for a smaller company doing work more aligned with your values? Is it possible to do some additional training as an engineer (versus 4-5 years as an electrical apprentice) to be able to do a different kind of work than you trained for?
posted by bluedaisy at 11:59 AM on November 5 [1 favorite]

The length of time that you would be able to do this work is much shorter than the length of time you woul be able to work as an engineer. Your pay won't be tied directly to stock market fluctuations but the trades are NOT insulated from the broader economy, far from it. And there will be booms and busts. I'm confused about the stock market thing---base pay at any tech company is going to be much much higher than what you would make as electrician.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 1:08 PM on November 5 [1 favorite]

If you are interested at all in testing, my spouse worked for decades in electrical testing and no day was the same as the one before. They are a testing lab, with regular customers. The lab is outside Philadelphia, and their biggest customer, for example, was Con-Ed, but they had all sorts of customers, including some military, but most were commercial manufacturers or end users. Some were municipalities that had had something electrical fail, say a subway car electrical system, a drawbridge electrical system that failed, etc. and needed the lab to figure out where the fault lay to sort out liability. In many cases they tested a device to the point of failure in order to certify that it was viable to a certain threshold. Part of his job was to design how to test each unique product, which he enjoyed as a creative person who wanted to design the most useful and efficient test possible.

They are always busy, with tests booked months in advance. It was an actual couple of people's job to figure out how to do the scheduling of available engineers and techs, shipping of the product to be tested, length of time to allow for testing, and available testing equipment. A sort of obscure EE career, but one he fell into and loved. If you think you might be interested, Memail me.
posted by citygirl at 1:40 PM on November 5 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: MeFi comrades, I really appreciate all of the helpful advice you've given and questions you've asked. Please keep them coming.

Here's me addressing a few more points that have been brought up.

> I wonder if you can bring some creativity into thinking about how you might use your engineering degree a bit differently? Do you have to join the rat race? What if decided to work for a smaller company doing work more aligned with your values? Is it possible to do some additional training as an engineer (versus 4-5 years as an electrical apprentice) to be able to do a different kind of work than you trained for?

I think working for a smaller company is a great idea, but these opportunities are pretty rare in my field (which is absolutely dominated by Fortune 500 companies), and tend to be quite geographically constrained. In particular, they tend to be clustered in major tech hubs like SF, Boston, and Austin, where the cost of living is outrageously high and home ownership is a moonshot even if you're an engineer. I will keep this open as an option, though.

> I'm confused about the stock market thing---base pay at any tech company is going to be much much higher than what you would make as electrician.

In my field, it is pretty common for companies to do lay-offs when the stocks dip, and hiring surges when the stocks rise. The base pay is high -- but honestly, it's way higher than I need to meet my financial goals, and the volatility is unsettling to me. Most of my engineer friends have to engage in "job-hopping" every couple years to maintain employment. This means either settling in an expensive city (e.g. SF, Boston, Austin) with lots of jobs, or moving regularly. I would much prefer {moderate income + small city + permanent living situation} to {high income + large city + volatile living situation}.

My understanding of the trades is that work will ebb and flow with economic trends, but generally I would have a decent chance of finding consistent employment with a permanent living situation in a small city. Please correct me if this is wildly misinformed.

Overall, I think the most promising suggestion I've received from this thread is to explore opportunities working as an EE in the renewable energy sector. I've just starting investigating this career path, but hopefully my investigations will lead me somewhere awesome. Thank you comrades!
posted by gunwalefunnel at 2:50 PM on November 5 [2 favorites]

Sudden thought: if you can do software/VHDL, on any level, maybe try for a chip-design software company? For example, Synopsys? They, speaking broadly here, generally need people who understand the hardware for any number of roles. Same for all of their competitors.

...they're big companies, but nowhere near as big as Big Tech, and I really enjoyed my time at an unnamed company that got bought by Synopsys (I took a buyout, but I'd have been equally happy to keep working at the company if only certain Life Things hadn't happened that made the buyout attractive).

There are innumerable niches in the EDA world that might work for you; the EDA universe is full of weird tiny companies that have very specific niches.
posted by aramaic at 5:19 PM on November 5

[I should say, a lot of the EDA universe operates similar to pharma -- tiny startups are built to attack one very specific problem, and if they do a good job they get bought by a behemoth, then the Principals go off to start a new tiny startup attacking a different problem. Point being, stock shenanigans will be a feature of your life if you go down this path, but on the other hand they're generally not terrible companies run by morons and they're mostly driven by efficiency rather than lobbying. Aart was a relatively decent guy compared to most of his cohort.]
posted by aramaic at 5:28 PM on November 5

You’re young. Spending a few years training to do something more socially useful (power generation) that also is financially stable is totally doable. Lots of people don’t even finish their terminal degrees until 30.
posted by haptic_avenger at 3:49 AM on November 6 [1 favorite]

Union plumber here (with a B.A. in math, so also a bit of a nontraditional latecomer to the trades). Unionized construction trades are 100% NOT resilient to market fluctations -- if you want that level of stability, you need to go into either service work (repair rather than construction), some sort of service or maintenance for a government entity (a wastewater treatment plant -- which means being open to rotating and night shifts, typically -- or an electrical utility, etc), or something like healthcare. Union construction jobs are also often NOT geographically flexible.

I will respond to your numbered items with some more info.

(1) Geographic flexibility
The union folks I know from, for example, southern Oregon work many, many hours north of their homes in Portland or Hillsboro. They maintain an apartment in the city and drive the 5 hours home to their families on weekends. The union hall in Duluth, MN straight up told me (a few years ago) that if I moved there, they would likely not have any work for me anytime in the foreseeable future.

Union trades jobs tend to be most plentiful in (1) denser population centers, and (2) random boomtown places, for example areas of Arizona right now where silicon chip fabs are being built. There are also frequently projects like oil pipelines that hire a lot of welders/pipefitters and some sparkies (electricians) too. Trades work can be very useful to the community, but it can also feel pretty mercenary at times. Certain projects may not align with your values; fossil fuel extraction and prisons are the two things I refuse to work on, but that refusal has definitely put my job in jeopardy in the past.

If the denser population center you live in is low on work, you will have to choose between either being laid off for a while or working as a "traveler" wherever the work is plentiful, which will likely be somewhere you wouldn't necessarily choose on your own. Often travel work pays per diem for housing. People who travel either buy a travel trailer, choose not to have a home base at all, or end up maintaining two residences -- one primary home (possible where their family lives) and one temporary apartment/hotel wherever they're working, often split with multiple other traveling trades workers to save money.

(2) Income resilient to stock market fluctuations;
It's not uncommon for people to be laid off for 6 month to a year or even more when work gets slow (like now, with high interest rates discouraging major construction projects). If you manage to get into service work (which is rarer in the unionized world -- we just have less of that market share, but hopefully that's changing) you will be more resilient. On the plumbing side, which I'm more familiar with, there are union service plumbing companies, but they are not as common. We did not get to choose where we got dispatched for apprenticeship, so I personally spent my apprenticeship in major construction and journeyed out with zero service plumbing or residential plumbing experience.

If you want a unionized, hands-on job that is more recession-proof than construction, I recommend HVAC/R service tech. It does involve programming, troubleshooting, and quite a bit of physics / STEM knowledge -- it might be a good fit for you?

I mean, don't get me wrong -- I've worked for 6-7 years straight without time off (except the time I took off on purpose for vacation). But I've also been laid off for 6 months at a time when I really, really didn't want to be laid off.

(3) With time, I will have the potential to become my own boss;
Not impossible, but MUCH more common on the non-union side. Union folks generally have a harder time starting a successful service or small projects company and making the money work out, because since you're union, you don't have the option to charge less in your first few years until you become successful. You have to pay yourself union rate, and that rate might not be competitive in the residential/service market in your region.

Again, opening up your own shop isn't impossible -- but I also know several plumbers who went non-union because they just couldn't make running their own union small business pencil out financially, even if they were flying totally solo with no employees. Going non-union meant giving up some or all of their 2 union pensions, plus often having to "buy" the right to leave the union because our apprenticeship training is considered a "scholarship loan" -- the union will penalize you financially if you take that free training and go non-union without paying enough dues back first. I'm not willing to go non-union, so it's never felt like a real option for me.

(4) I love interacting with customers;
I've never interacted with a customer as a union plumber; my customers have been like, Portland Public Schools, Daimler Trucking, Oregon School for the Deaf, Nike, etc, and someone much higher up at the company is handling that.

HVAC/R service would definitely allow you to interact more directly with customers (either commercial building managers or homeowners) than a career in a major construction trade. I know less about service electrical work, but it's worth talking to your local IBEW or an electrician you know and finding out more.

(5) Removing myself from the 'rat race' and having time to focus on my artistic hobbies;
A 5 year apprenticeship for most trades means working full-time (typically 6am-2:30pm or 6am-4:30pm if you're working overtime) plus attending school for five years. During my apprenticeship I gave up a lot of hobbies -- I stopped things like social dance because I was going to bed before the event started, and I stopped other hobbies because I was just too exhausted/busy with work and school to do other stuff.

If you're in an apprenticeship program that has daytime school that you take off work for, your experience may be much better; we had night school twice a week for 5 years (getting home from school at 10pm, getting up at 4:30am to drive an hour to the jobsite) and it sucked.

However, in any union contract I've had, it states "overtime shall not be mandatory", and you are hourly, and overtime pays 1.5x to 2x -- so I'm betting that's different than a salaried tech job. If it's a big overtime job and you don't want to work any overtime, you'll likely be the first laid off when work slows down; but if your contract states they can't require overtime, than you can't be fired or punished for refusing it (just picked first for layoffs). Personally, I've avoided overtime for most of my career and never run into issues with that.

(6) Unionized workplaces!
I love the union. The union negotiates the wage rates, advocates for and enforces safety standards, gets me great healthcare, and generally has given me a much more positive work experience than I've had other places. I find construction fascinating, even though I've been forced by injuries to move into the detailing/design (CAD/BIM) side. I also got good training through the union apprenticeship.

But unlimited geographic flexibility and reliably available work are not two of the things the union has given me. Don't get me wrong, I worked for 6+ years without a break when I started. But realistically, shit has been really slow recently, and it's very hard to stay busy as an existing apprentice or journeyman in many regions, let alone getting accepted as a new apprentice to a program.

With all these caveats, I still absolutely can personally recommend becoming a plumber, electrician, or HVAC/R service tech; but I do want you to have accurate information to base your decision on, to decide if it's a good fit for *you*.
posted by cnidaria at 11:21 AM on November 6 [1 favorite]

To clarify one of my points: most folks I meet who own their own small service or residential shops are non-union, especially in areas that aren't dense, urban cities.

In ideal world, a person would be able to be union, get that superior training and protection, and ALSO open their own shop. But it's pretty uncommon due to the financial hurdles I talked about. It's definitely an issue many unions are trying to work on with various tools at their disposal, so if you're looking at at particular apprenticeship program, I encourage you to ask them if they offer programs or resources to support members opening their own shop, if that's your goal.
posted by cnidaria at 11:32 AM on November 6

Look into Factory Applications or Field Applications at a company - those jobs are quite technical and you wind up interacting quite a bit with customers. You can also look into Marketing Engineering or Sales Engineering, which are less technical but even more focused on customers.
posted by coberh at 6:36 PM on November 6