Growing up in my household I was apprenticed into the world of trades. My Dad was an electrician. He loved his occupation. He told me that one of the trades was in my future. To whet my appetite for an occupation in the trades I became his apprentice on weekends where he earned extra money working side jobs. Under his tutelage, I learned the rudiments of the basic trades—plumbing, carpentry, electricity. Although my Dad was a great teacher, and extremely patient with an individual whose use of hand tools was always problematic, I found these jobs boring and poorly aligned with my hand/eye coordination. My hidden distaste for the trades became public when I applied for college in my senior year in high school.
In the years I attended college, I studied during the day and worked at several blue-collar jobs at night and during the summer. My rudimentary background in the trades proved helpful in these part-time jobs. After college, I went into careers in teaching and school administration. What follows are lessons I took away from my journey between the occupational worlds of the trades and the professions.
Lesson 1: Abstractions, Abstractions, Abstractions:
In classrooms, you are drawn into a world of abstractions that have little or no relationship to the problems I encountered on the factory floor. This does not mean on the factory floor there were no abstractions, but the abstractions relate directly to the use of tools that produce tangible outcomes. In the classroom, the abstract tools you acquire are applied to other abstractions, which, often produce unclear outcomes.
Lesson 2: Well-defined skills:
In the trades, there are well-defined skills that can be observed and rated for performance. In the classroom, the grades you receive tell us little about how well the abstractions you have learned will be applied in real-world situations.
Lesson 3: Depersonalization
In the professional world, you are subjected to a policy and protocol world that fits a particular role. That role may or may not fit the realities of the world the professional works in. In the trades, however, you come face-to-face with the realities of your job, with clear functions to be performed and clear standards of performance.
Lesson 4: My Bad
Working on the shop floor mistakes are up close and personal. Although the mistakes are recognizable by fellow workers, they also recognize and expect that the mistake will be corrected. In the professions, you are working with many unknown variables that are interacting in unpredictable ways. The uncertainties built into professional tasks make it difficult to determine blame for a bad outcome or how to remediate a bad outcome. Often these bad outcomes are blamed on the implementation process—unproven theories, poorly designed plans, lack of resources—which result in no professional assuming direct responsibility for the bad outcome, and, a feeling amongst decision makers that they are infallible.
Lesson 5: Loss of Agency
The concept of agency is activities directed to outcomes that the worker has determined to be worthwhile and under their full control to determine the worthwhile outcome. In the world of professions, the concept of agency becomes marginalized with functions and tasks that are of questionable value and in which the professional has little control over outcomes. Simply put, the agency comes down to who determines the ends. On the shop floor, ultimately the worker will have direct control over outcomes. In the office, outcomes are dictated by individuals lodged on the office floors above them.
Lesson 6: Coherent Principles of Practice
Each of my part-time jobs in assorted trade-like occupations possessed a set of specific skills and routines that resulted in concrete outcomes. Although the type of tasks I was assigned were rudimentary, the tradesman I worked with demonstrated the depth and breadth of the principles that guided their craft. In the professions, I was confronted with goals, functions, and tasks that were often abstractions from the roles I was asked to perform. So much of what I performed in school was founded on theories and practices that were incoherent, uncertain, and difficult to quantify. In actual practice, we based much of what we did on our own experience and attempted to make collective sense out of the research in our field, which, each article ending with the section termed, “limitations of the study.”
What I have attempted to describe in this blog are the differing goals, values, and practices between the trades and the professions. These descriptions, however, were formulated by what I would term the golden age of labor—where clear distinctions could be made between manual and white-collar work. In the last decade, however, both manual and white-collar work have been drained of their cognitive elements. The shop floor is now dominated by robots and the office floor is dominated by AI. The global economy is working at turning all occupations into assembly line work. The loss of status in both occupations field is having terrible social and political consequences.
Alan C. Jones 