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An e-article from CONTRACTOR Magazine reached my inbox. It was entitled, “4 Ways to Find and Hire Talented Technicians.” Notwithstanding my personal aversion to referring to journeymen, or any trade craftsman, as “technicians,” I began to peruse the piece. After all, finding, hiring, and retaining qualified and talented people is the backbone of our, or any, industry and we have certainly been in short supply in that category for quite a while.
I got as far as the first paragraph before I recognized that the article would not answer those questions satisfactorily, at least not for me. Let’s leave aside the “click bait” issue of having to provide all sorts of identifying information to the purveyors of the piece (it is after all a lead generating technique not unknown among publishers or advertisers), which is “Success Group International.”
What actually caught my attention was this sentence: “On top of that, there is often a fear of training someone new to the industry from the ground up (emphasis mine), only to have them move on to another job months (emphasis mine) later after you’ve put in the time, money and effort to train them.”
While the forgoing is an empirically true statement, it points up what I believe is one major problem with the mindset today of people in, and/or entering, our trade. What do I mean? We live in an era of instant gratification in America. You want something, you get something immediately. Whether it’s a car, take-out food, or a job. There is more emphasis being placed upon getting what you want right now than on acquiring something long lasting or working to acquire something in the future.
The idea of actually working for four or five years to learn a trade is an alien concept to most (young) people today (future engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers notwithstanding). Try explaining to a recent high school or community college graduate that if they enter the plumbing trade, they will have to work at it, full time, for four to five years before becoming a journeyman. Add to that the fact that apprentice plumbers do not get journeyman’s pay until they become journeymen and they will have to show up for work every day and work all day and, well… once they get done laughing in your face, you’ll have to move on to the next applicant.
As has been said before, this is a societal issue, and one for which there is no apparent fix on the horizon. The one sentence from the e-article makes my point though. How can we, as a trade, get across to our prospective new blood what it takes to become a professional plumber; a journeyman plumber who is fully trained, skilled, and able to command the highest wages available, when professional training organizations have the mindset that producing and retaining “technicians” after a few months of training is the issue? As well, there are other articles proclaiming that the fully trained journeyman is a thing of the past, supplanted by partially trained people doing piece work. I don’t believe that. I refuse to believe that.
As I have often pointed out in this column, we are an ancient and venerable craft, without which society as we know it in the 21st century would not exist. Getting this perspective out to the public is, in this writer’s opinion, one of the most critical issues facing our trade today. More to the point, how do we get past the instant gratification syndrome that we, as a society, have allowed to flourish?
Instilling pride of craftsmanship in the next generation might be one way to start. Take movies, for example. What with CG and other computer-generated images, the physical technical wizardry of years past has been eclipsed to such a point that viewers are hard pressed to know the difference between what is real and what is fake. Makeup artists of years past are no longer able to compete with computer generated graphics. Their craft has been morphed into an entirely new product.
Not so with the plumbing trade. Oh, sure, materials have changed, and methods of installation have changed, but the skills needed to put everything together into a functioning system have not. Those skill have evolved and are augmented by each new product released into the trade. The understanding of how things work and why things work and what the installation is supposed to do when complete is still something that a trained journeyman must know and be able to accomplish to do his job.
The sense of satisfaction in producing something with your own hands, hopefully, has not fallen by the wayside. That feeling of accomplishing something, of looking back at the end of a day and being able to see what you have done, is something that most people enjoy very much. At least they did when I was growing up.
I can’t help but feel that we need to get that sense of accomplishment into the minds of our younger generation. We might never stop the instant gratification syndrome that we have allowed to blossom in our society, so why not work on those feelings of personal pride in accomplishment? If I have learned anything over more than 60 years in the trade, those feelings are something everyone has. Some stronger than others, but we all seem to have the need of personal satisfaction. Why not use it to our advantage?
The Brooklyn, N.Y.-born author is a retired third generation master plumber. He founded Sunflower Plumbing & Heating in Shirley, N.Y., in 1975 and A Professional Commercial Plumbing Inc. in Phoenix in 1980. He holds residential, commercial, industrial and solar plumbing licenses and is certified in welding, clean rooms, polypropylene gas fusion and medical gas piping. He can be reached at [email protected].
Al Schwartz | Founder
The Brooklyn, N.Y.-born author is a retired third generation master plumber. He founded Sunflower Plumbing & Heating in Shirley, N.Y., in 1975 and A Professional Commercial Plumbing Inc. in Phoenix in 1980. He holds residential, commercial, industrial and solar plumbing licenses and is certified in welding, clean rooms, polypropylene gas fusion and medical gas piping.