If you don't recommend trucking then what?

After you hit the 4-6 year mark in a lot of trades you're in top pay catagory. You'll usually get a 1.5-2% annual raise for inflation but that's really it. With the amount of competition for qualified tradespeople most places are paying within a buck an hour of each other. The only real opportunity for advancement is to move up to a supervisor or manager. They don't usually hand out those positions to anyone but the long term folks either.

 

Hardly any job pays you to sleep or commute to work or pays you to take time off on "the weekend". If you divide the pay for a truck driver's week by the hours spent commuting, driving, working, sleeping/resting, taking a 34 reset, etc it's done for the purpose of showing how bad the pay is. Most people entering the field don't even bother to investigate the schedules, the HOS, or the pay. They do little more than Google "free CDL" and sign a contract with CR England before getting cold feet. YMMV

 

If you're an experienced tradesperson who wants to work you can pretty much pick and choose your employer right now.

 

FWIW, I wholeheartedly agree with @DRTDEVL's answer. The best thing you can do after high school is to work anywhere or experience real-life or go in the military services. It beats, by a country mile, enrolling at a university just because "grade 13" comes after grade 12 and waiting to reach a conclusion while taking out debt and practicing some bad habits. In the military you will get more responsibility sooner and have a safety net around you while you get paid. You will see and do things you won't see or do outside the military. You will at least learn if you like the service or not, and you may meet people with more ideas than you have about what job is interesting or what part of the country you want to experience. Besides, these days I understand the Drill Sergeants bring you milk and cookies before lights out.

 

Few other trades allow some civilian to be trained and employable 3 weeks from their first day at school. So it's not meant to be for everyone or great in every situation. Buyer Beware

 

I'd highly recommend someone learn some scripts to sell things. Big ticket stuff like roofs.

Anything that requires knocking on doors and can't be done online. Most of the stuff I'd recommend are going to be replaced here in the next decade by computers.

Trucking is fine to see the country I had fun with it. Ain't nothing wrong with it. Just gets boring making circles when you've done been everywhere and ain't much of a life spending it in a truck. They gave me an automatic truck and I said naw this is boring is why I stopped. Tried local making six figures with ups but didn't like it so went back to watching sports for money. Pays about the same as trucking and I work like three or four hours a day and not every single day to do so. Truckings fine though if you need to get out of debt or just starting out in life or whatever. Not a career more of a starter job or working vacation type thing imo.

 

Nursing.

 

I’m a former company truck driver who left the industry years ago because of driver monitoring technology and having to explain myself to recent college grads who’d never driven anything larger than a Tesla. My decades of experience and clean record meant nothing if the computer said I was in the wrong then they didn’t want to hear nothing else.

Nowadays I still drive trucks, but my own, and not big ones. I’ve made more money driving my own little trucks than I ever made driving someone else’s big ones.

 

What is the age of the person wanting the new career?

 

That's definitely one thing to take into consideration. Nothing like getting sidelined from one long time career, get all the schooling done, and find your apps/resumes getting quietly rejected due to being too old. Yet the irony of it all is that while people can be restricted from entering careers at a certain age, no one's immune from getting locked up at any age.


That said, the other two careers that have caught my eye are FAA certified "aircraft dispatcher" and a less darker version of Jeremy Renners "Inmate advocate" from Mayor of Kingstown. Plenty of flights for the foreseeable future that need to be tracked and plenty of people behind bars that need a voice on the outside.