Comment by curtis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by curtis | Hacker News Reader

I'm inclined to think that there ought to be a four year college degree that teaches a number of different trade skills as part of its core curriculum. A student in such a program might take history and mathematics courses similar to other college students, but would also learn concrete skills like welding, electrical wiring, HVAC, etc. The goal would be to have a graduate that might be able to find work in a variety of different trades, not just one particular one, and also provide graduates with some of the more traditional educational breadth associated with university.

University ought to make you a more rounded person, and a better citizen, and it ought to make you more employable, all three.

The trouble is, that graduate wouldn't be much more worthwhile than a fresh high-school grad. Taking a few welding courses won't make you employable for most jobs, it takes quite a lot of time to build up that skill. And while a bit of knowledge of other trades is always a good thing, it takes more than a few classes to prepare someone to work in HVAC. While the liberal-arts model of small amounts of exposure to different fields is good, more specialization and focus is needed.

For instance, I'm glad I took some economics classes in school, but in no way am I prepared to work in that field.

Further training might be required, but if there's a shortage of trained HVAC people, an employer might prefer to hire someone that already knows something about the field, and who happens to know a bunch of other stuff as well (because that indicates they're good at learning new stuff).

For the prospective employee, there's some advantage in not being deeply locked-in to one field in particular. Depending on economic circumstances, you might need to switch trades half-way through your career. The idea is that having some basic experience in a number of different skillsets will make a switch easier if you need to do that.

That's the theory anyway. I don't know whether it's really practical though.

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