What careers don’t get enough credit for being fulfilling, acceptable pay and a good work life balance?
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I’ve done all kinds of random jobs but like to tell anyone who will listen that my time as a cleaner was possibly the best of them all.
I worked in a building that was entirely dedicated to operating and adminning a traffic tunnel, so there were normal office rooms but also cool control rooms full of flashing lights and interesting displays and friendly people who were only too happy to infodump about it all.
The top floor was entirely given over to a conference room featuring a massive scale model of our tunnel but also the surrounding road system, complete with tiny toy cars. That room also had a hot drinks machine that was entirely free to employees so most of my breaks were spent up there with a book drinking hot chocolate.
Yeah, cleaning toilets and buffing floors is not exactly going to keep your mind occupied, but that just means it’s free to wander to more interesting places. No stress, nothing to take home at the end of the day.
If you can get by on the generally lower pay and get to clean somewhere interesting there are a lot of unexpected perks, tbh.
The janitor on scrubs seemed like the happiest person in the building
Honestly this was on my mind because I saw a clickbait YT title the other day claiming that the creator had one chance to do a thing or would have to “be a janitor forever” which…a) that’s ridiculous and b) doesn’t sound half bad to me at all 🤷♀️
Trades. Learn a trade. Electrician?
My kid fell for this. They promise you’ll get paid while you learn. What they don’t tell you is that IF you manage to pass the entrance exam (he did) you get put on a list for open apprenticeship positions, waiting to be called in at any moment. While you’re on that list you don’t get paid. If you do get a spot, contracts only last a couple of months. Then you go back on the list. Rinse and repeat. And the longer you’ve been in the union the higher up you get placed on the list. So the older members get placed before the newer ones no matter what number they were in line. This “join a trade” push is similar to the charter school scam, siphoning up state and federal training funds without delivering results.
Not to mention how it’s an old boys club who are just doing their own union minimums when they offer apprenticeship spots, not even the people in trades want to be part of the trades pipeline
The only people pushing trades are economists realizing the implications of all the trade electricians being near retiring age, and amgy Republicans who see it as a way to undercut the political trends that increasingly college educated folks have been pushing
I’m totally pushing learning a trade for my niece. Most trades can’t be outsourced or done with AI. And it’s pure gold again from South Park. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RcoGzT9QrTI
That sounds like a specific problem to whatever country you live in, not trades in general.
That’s US trades in a nutshell due to unions.
This is such a bad take. Getting in to the apprenticeship doesn’t gaurantee you work. You have to look at the market in your area to see if there is work for the trade you are going in to. Schools and job posting can give you hints on this. You may have to move where the jobs are. It’s a reality.
That union runs on a seniority priority for job call outs. Not all unions go by this, the one I was a part of gave priority to those who worked least the last 365 days. Don’t paint the whole system as a scam.
Also my union didn’t have contracts for callouts. The companies asked for X amount of guys, they go out for the duration the project. If they like you and there’s more work available then they keep you instead of sending you back on the out of work list. But that’s the nature of construction, it’s up and down and you never know if you have a job after completing a project.
Apprenticeships work the same for non-union, but you have to look for more work yourself if you get let go, same as any other job in the world.
I’ve considered trades even with it being a full 180 from what I do now. Seems like location can vastly vary the experience. Build the base and bones of what society runs off of seems interesting though.
