Quote Originally Posted by ndavies View Post
Salaries are up. The automotive sector is hiring like crazy. The salaries match east and west coast salaries. [[Without the coasts higher costs.)

Unfortunately, they lost 7 or so years worth of engineers during the collapse. They didn't hire them when they came out of school. Those engineers would be just coming into their peak productivity years. They also forced out many baby boom engineers to early retirement. Many previously solved quality issues have returned due to the loss of the knowledge these older engineers had.

Now the industry is losing the rest of the baby-boom age engineers to retirement. I'm one of the last baby boomers. I'll be retired within 10 years. [[No I don't think baby-boomer engineers are any better than the rest. This is just a numbers thing. There are lots of baby-boom engineers, it will require lots of people to replace them.)

As for skilled trades: When I was high school age, Most high schools had skilled trades classes. Now most high schools are college track and have dropped the skilled trades tracks. There's going to be a huge shortage of millwrights, electricians and plumbers. All jobs paying well above average incomes.
You said it better than I could have. Regarding skilled trades, allow me to let you in on how this can blowback big time.

In the early 90's, Australia had a similar policy of granting a relatively free college education to just about anyone who applied. By the late 90's, the economy had roared back [[especially the building industry) but there were very few skilled tradesman to fill demand. Fast forward to the late 2000's. Not only were tradies recieving salaries competative to professionals but the Australian building industry had to import tradies from places like India. Moral of the story, whenever government interferes with the free market, it typically results in negative repercussions that take years to unwind.