LIFE beckons like an endless summer when you’re 16.
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The end of school is nigh and the prospect of moving out of home and earning a dollar is tantalisingly close.
Or at least that’s how 16-year-olds used to think.
Many of today’s teens have another decade before they hit the full-time workforce, with a gap year and then university now almost a rite of passage.
The result – a critical undersupply of blue-collar tradies.
The current tradie shortage afflicting Wagga is not new and not unique to our community.
Even before an army of young tradies was lured interstate by cashed-up mining companies, there’s been a slow, inexorable drain on young men and women entering trades.
The reasons are manifold.
Parents are not encouraging their kids to enter trades like they once did, with the prestige of a uni degree trumping the practicality of earning a ticket.
Our disposable society has also conditioned young people to not need to be “fixers”. Many lack the hands-on skills of the older generation and seemingly have an aversion to manual labour.
Australia is now at the absurd point where we may have to draft in overseas tradies just to fill the void.
By late 2019, the Department of Employment expects the nation to need an extra 47,800 building tradespeople.
Over the past five years, an average of only about 12,000 building trade apprentices have graduated each year, meaning we’re headed for a serious tradie drought.
The consequences of this are clear – higher wages, higher prices for customers and a greater reliance on foreign labour.
There’s no silver bullet solution to the issue. But part of the fix must lie in a cultural shift in how we, collectively, value the trades.
Success shouldn’t just be measured by uni qualifications. Indeed, many tradies are out-earning their mates from high school who went on to uni.
The school system must also become more flexible and allow students to leave earlier to pursue a trade.
You can’t solve a problem without a strategy, just as you can’t build a home without tradies.
And that’s one home truth we need to take seriously.