Creative recruiting aims to shore up the elite ranks, but what's there for the rest?
No mystery why it's so hard to attract qualified people to your trade. There's the image problem of hard and dirty work. There's the school counselor problem of directing only losers toward trade careers. There's the must-go-to-college mentality -- heck, in a recent speech MCAA President Bob Fitzgerald admitted that "we do not see many of our journeymen encouraging their children to come into the trades; they encourage their children to go to college."
And there's the demographic problem. The emerging workforce is populated largely by minorities historically excluded from the skilled trades, and thus from the family traditions that perpetuated the trades in the past.